Voices of Preparedness: Anastasiia Kiseleva, Canadian Red Cross

How does the Canadian Red Cross support disaster preparedness efforts globally?

With the Canadian Red Cross, we have been working on National Society Preparedness for multiple years, on a global level with IFRC and other partners, but also with National Societies themselves. So earlier, in earlier days, we were working a lot in the bigger preparedness projects, but recently we’ve been taking a different approach, supporting some maybe small, but very focused and interesting initiatives that are coming out from National Societies’ priorities.

As the Canadian Red Cross, recently we’ve been supporting Bangladeshi Red Crescent with their Emergency Operation Center (EOC) enhancement. We came together with various partners and combined financial and technical resources available in an outside country to support this National Society priority. We looked at multiple things, for example, DRM systems, as well as Information Management systems and some of the technology needs for the Emergency Operations Center and supported National Society in creating several dashboards for better information management of operations and for the efficient operational decision making.

For example, Bangladesh Red Crescent, decided to include various types of information in their dashboard for Emergency Operation Center. Such information as responders availability, the trainings that they’ve taken in the past, locations of emergency stocks, or information coming from emergency needs assessment. It’s all combined in the dashboard that operational staff can use for the decision making.

Additionally, we supported Bangladesh Red Crescent with some of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to provide clear step-by-step instructions on how those dashboards can be used and updated. We used a really simple format in PowerPoint; so that could be easily translated to a local language and then used in the trainings with local responders and staff of the Emergency Operation Center. The dashboard that we created provides a unique opportunity to visualize all the information that Operation team needs to know about the operation and make the decisions fast and efficient.