Few days ago, my dearest ex-supervisor asked me to write an article on children and DRR and gave me a day to complete it. i spent hours and hours searching the internet about any information on it, surprisingly nearly or most of the information refers to disaster education in school/children disaster education, formally. i must admitted that education is the main issue and probably the best media to incorporate DRR into it, but i cant stop wondering about those children who out of school or dont have chance to be educated or those who are living in street or even those who live in isolated, small or outer island.
Children are part of the vulnerable group, yet even in this category, there is also children that are marginalized. It comes to realize me that we must also aware that not all children able to speak, read or write, with the limitation and access that they have, we must also consider various way to promote DRR. i notice that some NGOs create game and fun activities such as story telling and song that enable these children to aware and respond to any disaster signs, but still how far do the activities effectively affect these children in term of their respond mechanism?
Furthermore, i was browsing to all policies related to children and DRR, until now, i did not find any specific policies that mentioned about children's role in DRR. in Bill Number 23 year 2002 on Child Protection, only stated special protection for children as disaster victims by fulfilling their needs. i am aware about children rights and their needs, but rarely we see them as a subject rather than object, we even rarely heard their voices. i found a good concept which i think can be applied for DRR-Children approach, a concept known as Growing Up in Cities (GUC)/Child Friendly City Initiative (CFC). i know that this concept is an urban context, but with some modification it is also suitable for rural and coastal too. anyway, CFC is the embodiment of the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the local level, which is practice means that children’s rights are reflected in policies, laws, programmes and budgets. In a child friendly city, children are active agents; their voices and opinions are taken into consideration and influence decision making processes (www.childfriendlycities.org). Imigine that the children can participate in the development planning process, can decide what is best for them (in term of education, health, etc), can give their opinion and feedback to government policies, and so on. lets try to think as children rather than adults, we do experiencing our childhood, when the adults rarely heard our opinion, understanding our act and thought. it might a good way to learn more about them and involve them actively into our program, there's no early age for them to understand adults like us, so let's them speak!.
