Indah: Improving Disaster Management Services in Indonesia

My name is Indah. I am a 16-year-old member of the East Jakarta Children's Forum and a Citizen Voice and Action (CVA) facilitator.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, all children had to stay at home. However, Wahana Visi Indonesia - supported by USAID - implemented the SinerGi Project.

The SinerGi project opened up opportunities for me to keep doing activities that are positive and have an impact on the environment. I have experienced flooding, because I live in a location that is prone to it.

Then in 2021, I took the initiative to volunteer to become a CVA facilitator.

What is CVA? It’s an advocacy approach where the community, including children and those with a disability, understand their rights and are able to participate in improving the quality of public services.

In this case, I and other friends took a CVA approach to improve the quality of disaster management services.

The stage begins with training of CVA facilitators. We were trained on the stages of CVA before implementing it to our peers.

We also recorded groups of people with disabilities to be involved in the CVA stage. We are currently in the scoring card stage. In this scorecard, we can assess the minimum service standards and can express our expectations regarding disaster management services in our area.

From the results of the assessment cards, there were 54 participants from the youth and youth groups. 25% of them are dissatisfied with government services in their area.

Not only can they provide assessment score, my friends can provide their comments regarding disaster management services.

Two of them think that children's participation in society is quite good, but the involvement of disability groups is still lacking.

In general, disaster management services have been very good for us teenagers, but there are things that need to be improved.

In the future, I and other facilitators will still collect data from each stage of the CVA. After that, we will voice the results to the stakeholders, so that the rights of the community will increasingly be fulfilled.

My hope for the government is that in the future every party can be involved in disaster risk reduction, including youth, women and disability groups. I also hope that the government will continue to coordinate with all parties in disaster management.