“The risk of disaster is so high that Indonesia is called “the supermarket of disasters.” Therefore, we need to put greater efforts to reduce the disaster risk.” said Mr Willem Rampangilei, the Head of the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), at an international symposium held jointly by Asia Pacific Alliance for Disaster Management (A-PAD) and Indonesian National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (PLANAS) in January 19 in Jakarta. As the title of symposium “The Way Forward: Public-Private Partnerships in Disaster Risk Management” indicates, the main focus of the symposium is to address the role of private sector in disaster management and to share the best practices of the private sector’s involvement in the area and of public-private cooperation in building community disaster resilience.

Besides Mr Rampangilei, Mr Kozo Honsei, Minister and Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of Japan in Indonesia, Mr. Sugeng Triutomo, board member of PLANAS, Mr Kensuke Onishi, CEO of A-PAD, and Mr Tomohiro Hamakawa, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the NGO “Kopernik” were invited as guest speakers.

In his opening remarks, Mr Honsei stressed the positive role of the private sector when large scale disasters strike: “To build a truly effective disaster response system, industry, government and the NGO community must work together.” Mr Honsei expressed the hope that A-PAD can function as a nucleus for such public-private collaboration in disaster management. Mr Rampangilei also conveyed his expectation towards A-PAD for further engaging in partnership with the private sector: “I would like very much to see A-PAD’s know-how utilized in order to save many more lives.”

In the first of two sessions that followed, leaders of A-PAD from Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Indonesia shared their experiences in multi-sector collaboration. In the discussion groups that formed the second of the two sessions, participants exchanged ideas on what the private sector can do to improve disaster risk reduction.  Just before the close of this session, Mr Tomohiro Hamakawa of Kopernik explained their activities to improve the living conditions of people in developing countries with state-of-the-art private sector technologies.

A-PAD will continue to work toward improvement of disaster response mechanisms through multi-sector collaboration in order to save more lives.