Two Dean’s List students of the pioneering batch of the Executive Master in Disaster Risk and Crisis Management (EMDRCM) Program of the Stephen Zuellig Graduate School of Development Management were guest speakers in the recently conducted ASEAN ICT webinar “DRRM On Smart Cities” organized by the Philippines’ Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) together with its counterparts from Vietnam and Brunei on September 03, 2020.
Ace Esmeralda and Wally Panganiban delivered applicable and innovative concepts during the said webinar, which Information and Communications Technology (ICT) professionals from the ASEAN countries attended. Both speakers centered on sharing ideas on disaster risk reduction and management to enhance the on-going Smart Cities and connectivity initiatives.
Esmeralda shared the Resilience Programming Framework (RPF), which details specific management mechanisms that can help public and private institutions move from asset protection, risk management, and disaster response to resilience building.
The RPF, a framework developed by Esmeralda and Panganiban under their start-up initiative,Resilient.PH is currently the backbone of at least two capstone projects from the EMDRCM class. It was also the foundation of their entry (Akay Soliditary Fund and Sulong Bayanihan App) to the recently conducted AIM hackathon, that made it to the final round.
Resilient.PH is a social enterprise committed to advancing resilience programming across institutions in the country.
“We are very passionate about sharing the framework to as many groups as possible. Hopefully, with more groups evaluating it and analyzing its applicability in their respective organizations, we can fine-tune the framework so that it can be an effective and holistic tool for transforming the way we operate organizations and business enterprises.” Esmeralda explained.
For his part, Panganiban talked about the importance of risk communication and the need to evaluate and improve this two-way process continually. He started his presentation by asking the participants if they feel that the way risk is communicated to the vulnerable stakeholders has been enhanced with ICT advances. To this, the participants responded that it does not seem to be the case.
DICT also invited Esmeralda and Panganiban last July 29, when the department organized the webinar, “An Integrated and Resilient Network for DRRM,” for local disaster risk reduction and management officers (LDRMMOs) of all local government units in the country.
