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A burgeoning project management community is helping Bangladesh prepare for a range of natural disasters, slowly transforming a reactive leadership model into a solid risk-assessment culture.
The goal of the Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme (CDMP) is both radical and simple — help make a better future for one of the poorest and most disaster-prone countries on Earth. And the ambitious collaborative effort — established in 2004 between the government of Bangladesh, the European Commission, the U.K. Department for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme — is already making a difference on the ground, helping Bangladesh better manage risk and prepare for a range of natural disasters, according to Ian Rector, chief technical advisor for the CDMP.
Natural disasters hit Bangladesh worse than anywhere else it seems, from killer cyclones to massive floods. A full 15 percent of the country floods yearly, something that if happened in the U.S., would render a stretch of land comparable to Texas and California useless.
Yet the work the CDMP is doing in Bangladesh is a ready example of how traditional project management techniques are being put to enormously good use in developing countries and where reactive leadership is slowly transforming into a solid risk-assessment culture.
For example, the $25 million project has, among many other achievements, established more than 550 community risk assessments and risk reduction action plans, affecting 15–20 million people, and created a full database of organizations undertaking disaster management activities in Bangladesh.
Ten research projects analyzing the impact of climate change have been implemented and a climate change library and Web site have been established, as well as an institutional mechanism that predicts climate and flood impact.
Risk reduction and climate change research are top priorities for Bangladesh, a rapidly modernizing country of 150 million people where most people still earn a living from agriculture.
"The main thing, from a project management perspective globally, is disaster management and risk reduction expertise can be hand picked and consolidated within a dynamic team in any country or region to address immediate to mid-term skill deficiencies and, of course, to help build national capabilities,” says Rector, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
“The problem in most developing and perhaps some developed countries is that they don’t have a professional cadre of highly skilled disaster management or risk-reduction professionals that are developed in the same way as doctors and lawyers and so on," Rector says.
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