TEDxTokyo Talk: Myth, Lies and Truths about Disaster Response

Our Responsibility

What happens when disasters strike is an unfortunate twist of fate. What happens after is our responsibility.

Far too many people, children, women, elders, men end up crippled or maimed for life as a result of our inefficient response. Those who die during disaster are nature’s fault, but those who die after the disaster are our fault.

Small wounds infect, unhealthy sanitary conditions attract disease, lack of physical therapy and follow-up reduce the quality of life of survivors or ends their life altogether.

The Challenges of Conventional 20th Century Relief

Too often a savior-refugee approach with the best intentions in the world ends up promoting inefficient processes of exclusion of local stakeholders that limit the impact and efficiency of relief efforts and makes them more costly, unnecessarily complicated and disconnected from the human needs and perspective of the survivors.

People all over the world respond to disaster flooding donation channels with amazing displays of solidarity that conventional organizations are ill-equipped to handle and fail to translate in amazing results in the field. 20th century structured organizations, “old-school” approaches, top-down hierarchies and bureaucracies and a number of myths and lies about disaster response are some of the reasons why months, years and even decades after disasters the recovery process is often slow, limited, unfair, uneven, inefficient, irrelevant and highly disconnected from the dignity, capacity and the human needs of disaster survivors.

Overcoming the Challenges of Disaster Response in the 21st Century with Relief 2.0

Relief 2.0 is a focus in running the last mile in disaster response leveraging the capacity and potential of local stakeholders and resources with the support of mobile technologies and social networks to engage, enable, empower and connect the survivors in a participative, transparent and dynamic recovery process.

Watch our TEDxTokyo Talk on our list of 10 myths, lies and truths learned through our recent experiences in 21st century Disaster Relief 2.0 in Haiti and Japan.