04/11/2025
Institutionalizing CBDRM Through a Standardized Curriculum: To improve and standardize its Community-Based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) curriculum and training manual, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat-Pakistan (AKAH-P), together with the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM), a think tank of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), worked on updating the CBDRM training curriculum. The objective was to incorporate emerging hazards associated with climate change, evolving risks, and key fundamental concepts to ensure that local government officials and at-risk communities receive improved and standardized CBDRM training.
This training manual serves as a standard curriculum to be used across Pakistan, promoting a consistent approach to CBDRM. While government and non-government stakeholders are encouraged to adapt the content to fit their local geographical and socio-economic conditions, NIDM strongly recommends following the core CBDRM process outlined in this training manual. Doing so will ensure uniformity in forming disaster management committees, conducting participatory risk assessments, and disaster management planning using standard templates. It will also enable NIDM to maintain a record of trained community volunteers and local government officials, helping NDMA, PDMAs, and DDMAs to effectively engage these trained individuals during emergencies.
In its capacity, CBDRM has been initiated as one of the core programmes undertaken by the AKAH-P. Through this programme, AKAH-P has trained over 50,000 volunteers across different regions by imparting a series of CBDRM and Community Emergency Response trainings, conducting mock exercises, forming committees, and equipping them with emergency response equipment. Due to these training initiatives, there are now 191 professionally trained Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) in mountain, coastal, rural, and urban settings of Central and Southern Pakistan. Additionally, emergency response kits were provided to CERTs, which are comprised of professionally trained disaster responders, to assist individuals in the best and most timely manner in the event of an emergency.
To further strengthen the capacities of community volunteers and disaster management committees, AKAH-P decided to revise its CBDRM curriculum. For this purpose, AKAH-P partnered with NIDM/NDMA to jointly revamp and standardize the training curriculum.
