Author : Konstantina Karatzoudi
With the increasing impact of disasters during the recent years, it is becoming more and more crucial to all individuals the contribution to community preparedness and resilience for disasters. This effort to improve community preparedness demands an intimate cooperation where all involved members should be positively motivated and clearly understand their critical role towards the community as community resilience is an effort to create more resisting, capable and more quickly recovering from disasters community. In other words, it is a shared responsibility among government, NGOs and private sector organizations that must cooperate in order to create well prepared communities capable to protect against, respond to and recover from disasters.
It is a common sense that disasters today cause a huge economic impact that preparedness, response and recovery became a community responsibility. This means that governments cannot carry the burden alone but instead of this, federal government, state, local authorities and private sector, they all play important roles towards a common goal, creating preparedness network that could support entire communities. Surprisingly, a non conventional contributor such as private sector has been long a major contributor to humanitarian and social actions.
The growing role of businesses poses an important challenge to traditional humanitarian sector and it is increasingly considered as an alternative to traditional aid agencies. Businesses have repeatedly aided communities affected by disasters and have contributed to strengthen infrastructure or create job after crises and disasters.
However, the question is if the private sector can balance its role in community preparedness with the obligations to its shareholders and their interests and at the same time to examine which is the role of governments and NGOs in this common effort to ensure community resilience.
What are your thoughts?
Should private sector contribute to community preparedness and resilience?
Future's Management 