Universitas Ahmad Dahlan and Universitas Islam Indonesia co-host the official Kick-off Meeting of the BUiLD Project – Day 1
The official Kick-off Meeting of the BUiLD project took place on the 2nd and 3rd December in Yogyakarta and was co-hosted by Universitas Ahmad Dahlan (UAD) and Universitas Islam Indonesia (UII) in Yogyakarta.
This was the first time the consortium convened to discuss the vision and the deliverables of the project and to review the initial proposals for the delivery of the different work packages. The first day was hosted by UIl. It started with an educational tour including displays of Mount Merapi’s lava flows and exclusion zones.
Following the official welcome by Rector Professor Fathul Wahid, colleagues at UII gave presentations on the University’s current disaster response and recovery activities. With one of its professors being a former member of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Planning has established a Disaster Risk Reduction Centre (DiRReC) and offers a Master’s degree specialising in earthquake engineering and disaster management. The Faculty of Medicine has a disaster responsive medical team, which was deployed to provide early medical support during past and recent earthquake disasters in Indonesia, including those in Lombok, Palu, and Donggala. UII shared their experience of managing the displacement of staff and students during a past eruption of Mount Merapi by setting up a temporary campus outside the exclusion zone and presented the concept of “smart” villages.
Project Lead Nadine Sulkowski from the University of Gloucestershire (UOG) Business School (United Kingdom) kicked off a series of presentations outlining the vision of the BUiLD project and it relates to national aspirations to develop universities as key change agents in developing Indonesia’s disaster resilience.
Michael Fuller MBE, Director of Global Resilience and Resilience Consultant at UOG, gave an introduction to the Disaster Resilience Framework, Information Exchange and Management Model and Target Operating Model that will form the basis for building disaster preparedness and response capability within participating universities.
Antonio Marques and Viviana Meirinhos from Institute Polytechnic Porto (IPP, Portugal) presented the implementation strategy for designing a disaster awareness campaign aimed at staff, students and associate communities using virtual reality.
Sanne Lehmann from the University College Copenhagen (UCC, Denmark) led an introductory workshop on developing disaster management curriculum benchmarks that the BUiLD project aims to embed across academic programmes.
Wing Raharjo from UII and Ida Puspita from UAD, who are jointly leading the development of a national disaster resilience network and fundraising campaign, presented their proposal for the creation of Centres of Excellence in Disaster Resilience in each participating university. Based on the penta helix model, the vision behind the creation of the centres and the national disaster resilience network is to facilitate collaboration between universities and the public, private and third sector.
The first day ended with a press conference attended by hosts Wing Raharjo, Ida Puspita and the project management team Nadine Sulkowski, Michael Fuller and Professor Neil Towers.
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