Building collective capacity to disrupt urban risk traps: capacity building workshop in Malawi

The DPU’s Emmanuel Osuteye, Rita Lambert and PhD Candidate Donald Brown, as part of the wider Urban ARK programme, conducted a 3-day capacity building workshop in February 2017 to enhance the capacity of Neighbourhood Disaster Risk Management (NDRM) Committees in Karonga, Malawi to monitor and document the processes that drive risk accumulation over time and to appraise the practices deployed and resources mobilized to mitigate, reduce and prevent risk.

This component of the DPU’s Urban ARK research led by Adriana Allen aims to provide fresh insights into how the governance of risk reduction currently works in the context of Malawi and to enhance the capacity to act of those most vulnerable to be trapped in risk accumulation cycles.

In summary the objectives of the training delivered were:

• To corroborate the working boundaries of the NDRM committees and identify the boundaries of the neighbourhood or villages within each of them (hither to, these boundaries have not been officially demarcated and the Urban ARK project presents a great opportunity to document local traditional knowledge).
• To consolidate and validate the knowledge relating to the hazards and vulnerabilities affecting the settlements within each Neighbourhood and evaluate the capacity to mitigate, reduce and prevent risk.
• To equip participants with skills to map (both manually and through mobile processing applications like “Ramblr”) and monitor systematically the above conditions through a virtual analytical tool called ‘ReMapRisk’.

In all 5 villages were mapped as part of the workshop and a team of the trained NDRM Representatives, supported by the Urban ARK research counterparts at Mzuzu University, Malawi, will continue mapping the remaining villages by end of July 2017.