IPWEA’s charity of choice RedR Australia is in need and we are calling on our network of colleagues to donate what they can to support disaster relief efforts in Vanuatu.
Tropical Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu with winds of up to 300kmph on 13 March. Over the course of two days, 90 per cent of homes in the capital Port Vila were destroyed as well as many more around the islands. At least half of the population has been affected, but the scale of the disaster is yet to be fully understood.
IPWEA is a founding member of RedR Australia, the humanitarian agency for disaster relief. The organisation was established in 1992 by engineer Jeff Dobell to help communities rebuild and recover in times of crisis.
RedR Australia is a partner to eight United Nations’ agencies and deploys its people as United Nations experts on mission. RedR’s standby register includes the types of professionals that are needed for a multidisciplinary humanitarian response. This includes engineers whose skill set includes anything from shelter construction and site planning through to logistics, securing a water supply, or running electricity for a refugee camp.
“RedR deployees currently on the ground in Vanuatu are UN experts on mission, playing key roles in shelter, WASH, food security, logistics, child protection, communications, and civilian-military coordination/humanitarian affairs. The impact of their work is considerable,” said RedR Australia CEO Kirsten Sayers.
Swan Environmental founder David Swan has been IPWEA’s representative on the RedR Australia Board for the past decade. He calls on his IPWEA colleagues to donate what they can to help deploy RedR’s people to Vanuatu.
“At the moment, RedR has its own appeal for funding. This money will assist with deployments to Vanuatu,” said Swan.
As the only UN standby partner in the southern hemisphere, RedR was well placed to respond to this emergency. RedR had three people prepositioned in Vanuatu, and a further three nearby to help when the cyclone hit. A fourth person was deployed to the region immediately after the disaster.
A further 50 trained RedR register members have put themselves forward for deployment to the region. RedR is currently assessing which skills are required on the ground before they start selecting people to send over to help the emergency relief efforts.
Swan encouraged his IPWEA colleagues to join RedR’s standby register for future relief efforts.
“What RedR needs is not specialist geotechnical engineers or specialist bridge designers, necessarily, they really want generalist engineers who have got a good handle on public works issues – roads, bridges, sanitation supply,” said Swan.
“IPWEA has the best people to be on a RedR register because they typically have local government or other public works experience.”
“We need to get a lot more of those people, particularly on the engineering side, on the register and doing the training.”
Applicants are typically sent on three-month deployments with United Nations’ agencies, funded by the Australian Government. They are paid professionals.
RedR Australia is a registered training organisation, and is the preferred training provider for Australian Government staff and the NGO community, attracting participants from all over the world. Their training courses are a prerequisite for people seeking to join the standby register for deployment on UN and other emergency response field missions.
Click here to find out more about RedR’s standby register.
RedR was one of two organisations that received funding from the Australian Government to combat Ebola in West Africa. RedR has so far sent twelve deployees to the field to assist communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Ghana.
RedR Australia’s Director of Partnerships and Business Development, Emma Kettle, was deployed to the World Health Organisation (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland in November 2014.
Kettle’s role was to assist WHO in developing and rolling out a pre-deployment training package for all Ebola responders, called the GO! package. WHO has declared that the GO! package developed by Kettle is versatile enough to be implemented for all other future major outbreaks.
RedR Australia is now asking for your support.
To find out more about how you can get involved with, or support RedR Australia,
visit www.redr.org.au