{"id":3157,"date":"2013-05-15T20:57:30","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T20:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/?p=3157"},"modified":"2016-05-03T11:07:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T18:07:34","slug":"iddr12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/archives\/3157","title":{"rendered":"Women and Girls: a visible force for resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The International Day for Disaster Reduction (IDDR) takes place every year on October 13. Since 2011, the Day has been part of a 4-year concept<\/a> to build up momentum to 2015, an important date for the United Nations – it’s not only the deadline of the Millennium Development Goals<\/a> ends, but also when the 10-year international framework<\/a> for disaster risk reduction comes to an end. Conceptualized during my work with UNISDR, the 4-year Step Up initiative aims to promote disaster risk reduction and build up partnerships along the way to create a movement for the post-2015 international framework for disaster risk reduction.<\/p>\n

Each year of the Step Up initiative focuses on a theme and group as described in the UNISDR website:<\/p>\n

The Step Up initiative started in 2011 and will be focusing on a different group of partners every year leading up to the World Conference for Disaster Reduction in 2015 – Children and Young People (2011), Women and Girls (2012), people with disabilities (2013), and the ageing population (2014).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Watch the Romanian video below<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2012, my role was to establish an online promotional campaign, that included using social media, to raise awareness about the day and highlight the role of Women and Girls as a force for disaster resilience. I also designed the t-shirts (photo above) for UNISDR for the day which were a big hit, especially the QR code on the backside.<\/p>\n

In partnership with a whole range of partners and tapping into other campaigns such as “Because I am a Girl<\/a>“, I led the project in developing an interactive website to celebrate IDDR, which included getting people to comment on and “map<\/a>” the role of women in disaster risk reduction. We also developed a strategy to promote and engage in conversation on Twitter and Facebook, and setup a Flickr group for people to share photos. The partnerships, collaboration, and promotion led to the 2012 International Day becoming a global event with activities taking place from Afghanistan to Zambia. Over 80 countries celebrated the day with the theme “Women and Girls: the [in]Visible Force of Resilience”.<\/p>\n

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IDDR 2012 in Uganda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before the day, I had an understanding that social media would be a powerful force for advocacy and promotion, much more than your traditional media broadcast. But, the results were beyond our expectations! We did a quick count and over 5000 tweets using #iddr were seen over 27 million times! Here’s a sample <\/a> of what people were saying before, during and after the 2012 IDDR.<\/p>\n

… and check out these videos below. The first one by a small island in the Caribbean who put a music video together, splicing video messages from different people, and second one of artists doing a graffiti mural interpreting the theme in Romania. This is inspirational and shows that there is not only interest in risk reduction, typically a difficult concept to understand, but also that there are people and groups who have the creativity to make this important subject, dare I say, cool!<\/p>\n