First Women Led Community Vulnerability and Hazard Mapping and Exchange on Community Resilience Practice Underway in Honduras

Trujillo, Honduras: July 15, 2008: The Comite de Emergencia Garifuna Honduras (CEDAGH), a member of GROOTS International, inaugurated the Community Hazard and Vulnerability Mapping and Exchange on Resilience Practice today opening the 5 day peer training and community exchange workshop involving 27 grassroots women leaders from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and nearby Garifuna communities in Honduras. Carmen Griffiths and her Jamaican team from the Construction Resource Development Center (CRDC) in Kingston will lead the hazard and vulnerability mapping reviewing the theory and tools of mapping today in a workshop seminar and traveling tomorrow to the town of Guadalupe--a hurricane struck community where CEDAGH has organized--to teach three teams of Central American participants how to map the vulnerabilities and strengths of this disaster prone community.

Starting in Guadalupe, the Comite will share a range of effective community resilience practices it has pioneered with visiting community leaders, including community run tool and seed banks that provide food security, tree planting for coastal protection, and techniques for building hurricane safe roofs. Participants will also visit Aguan--a community devastated by Hurricane Mitch and the aftermath (flooding, etc) to learn how residents took close to ten years to relocate a large number of families to a new settlement with new homes on a higher ground and are still struggling to bring everyone along and create a strong developing community.

The grassroots peer learningand capacity building workshop--funded with the support of the UNDP Gender Unit and the American Jewish World Services--is one element of GROOTS International's Thematic Program on Fostering Grassroots Women's Leadership in Community Resilience. Focused on piloting activities and initiating partnerships and policy dialogues that demonstrate grassroots women's organizations can and must be at the center of localizing the Hyogo Framework for Action, the program is led by GROOTS members in LAC, South Asia and Turkey. At a time when hundreds of millions of dollars are being allocated to national disaster management programs and disaster response, these women's groups are cooperating to ensure that local development initiatives feature vulnerability and risk reduction principles and reward partnerships between grassroots women's groups and local authorities.

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