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Flood-prone communities in Guatemala will benefit from ICMA’s expertise in emergency management, institutional capacity building, and training, thanks to a new award from the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). SOUTHCOM, located in Miami, is one of ten unified Combatant Commands (COCOMs) in the Department of Defense, responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for much of Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Guatemala is particularly vulnerable to hurricanes by virtue of its location between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. But communities vary in their level of awareness and in their knowledge of flooding disaster mitigation and response. In this fast-moving three-month project, ICMA will assess the disaster readiness of these communities and develop a training and exercise program for them.
Based on previous experience in the country, ICMA will gather information from dozens of stakeholders and from national and regional entities whose resources can inform the current project. A critical area of the assessment will be information on interagency coordination and established communications networks and systems. ICMA has pioneered in the promotion of a networked approach to emergency management in the United States.
In selected municipalities, ICMA will conduct focus groups with key stakeholders from national, departmental, and local governments, the private sector, citizens, and local organizations (known locally as CODEDES, COCODES, and COMUDES) to assess local capacities and working knowledge of flood mitigation and response. These focus group sessions will enable the ICMA team to identify the information and knowledge gaps with respect to local response capacities and develop an appropriate training program for the communities.
With all this information in hand, ICMA will identify class training topics and develop a training schedule, along with exercise scenarios. Topics may include such subjects as dissemination of early alerts systems, management of temporary shelters, communication methodologies, management of food and supplies, participation of schools, and coordination among local and national entities.
To ensure that training and the accompanying materials are appropriately tailored to the audience in terms of cultural content and reading level, ICMA will contract with a team of curriculum development and manual design experts from Guatemala with experience working with indigenous populations and rural areas. The resulting materials, both printed and audiovisual, will be used in training classes and as take-aways for community participants.
This new funding recognizes not only ICMA’s extensive experience in disaster mitigation but also its track record in Guatemala and other Latin American countries. As a subcontractor to DevTech Systems, Inc., ICMA is one of the implementers of the Guatemala Decentralization and Local Governance Program, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. That program provided technical assistance to municipalities of the Department of San Marcos during the reconstruction period following Hurricane Stan in 2006.
For additional information about ICMA’s work, see the Guatemalapage on the ICMA Web site, or contact international@icma.org.
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