It’s been 3 years since a tsunami devastated large parts of southeast Asia.
Since then the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPD) has been involved in the rebuilding effort.
“When the stage of the immediate disaster relief is over, the media, the celebrities and even most of the donors are gone,” Dr. Yehudah Paz, chairman of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPD), said last week.Not so the NISPD, one of several Israeli organizations that initiated a program to assist Sri Lankan cooperatives to get back on their feet after the 2004 tsunami ruined their livelihood.
Here’s the background:
The NISPD works closely in Sri Lanka with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), an umbrella organization of the world’s cooperatives and the largest non-governmental organization in the world.A few months after the tsunami, NISPD representatives arrived in Sri Lanka with a plan to rebuild ruined businesses by establishing an educational business program.
B’nai B’rith International joined this effort, with envoys that were at first busy providing Sri Lankan survivors with food and rebuilding their houses, and later helped finance and coordinate the NISPD program.
The third participant in the Israeli-Jewish humanitarian collaboration is the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which funded most of the activity and allocated $300,000 for the entire project.
IsraAID – the Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid – served as the overall coordinator.
The four organizations contacted the ICA in Sri Lanka, which has six million members in the disaster-stricken country.
Specifically this is the role they played:
Over the past three years, the groups have worked with the cooperative movement in Sri Lanka, training 1,500 business managers of agricultural, tourist and retail cooperatives that were damaged in the tsunami. These business managers reach out to thousands of small businesses and merchants in southern Sri Lanka.”The purpose was not to rebuild what was ruined, but to use this disaster as an opportunity to promote these cooperatives and the local economy,” Rafi Goldman, director of the International Center for Cooperative Studies, a division of the NISPD, told the Post.
In related news, Israel recently joined a committee of the UN devoted to responding to disasters:
The United Nations emergency teams that support Member States in coordinating disaster response within hours of tragedy striking conducted nine missions to the Americas this year, the highest ever, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported today.Overall, the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams carried out 14 missions in 2007, higher than the usual yearly number, 70 per cent of them in response to hurricanes and floods, “possibly a glimpse of the shape of things to come given the reality of climate change,†OCHA said.
The UNDAC system consists of more than 160 national emergency managers from 57 countries together with staff from OCHA and 12 other international organizations, including UN agencies and the Red Cross and Crescent movement in cooperation with non-governmental organizations and private sector companies. This year Israel and the United Arab Emirates joined the system.
Though it’s largely under the radar, Israel continues to be one of the world leaders in disaster response.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
