Be Alert: Prepare to Respond (project) SUMMARY 
In June 2020 a 22-month long action, led by Plan International Dominican Republic in partnership with Oxfam Intermon and Habitat for Humanity, started to support  local and national actors’ disaster preparedness to reoccurring hazards in Santo Domingo Este in the Dominican Republic. The province is exposed to multiple negative impacts of hazards like flooding, landslides and tsunamis. The action will strengthen local populations’ resilience to weather extremes and seismic events by consistently applying a gender, protection and inclusion approach. Among the beneficiaries there will be focus on women, children, migrants and people living with disabilities. The action has 5 components: 1. Emergency response with a focus on protection, inclusion and migrants, 2. Critical information management, 3. Design of contingency response plans at community level, 4. Increasing urban resilient construction capacities, 5. Communication and advocacy on disaster preparedness. Targeted communities identified a lack of community structures or means to work with the government on DRM. Consequently, they lack capacity to respond to natural hazards and have few preparedness mechanisms in place. Provincial and municipal actors report lack of access to real time information, needing physical and digital documents to facilitate decision-making before, during, and after the impact of a hazard. Some of the problems reported in school infrastructure were: a lack of evidence of geotechnical studies; weak structural redundancy; poor water quality and inadequate sanitation; lack of school risk management or emergency plans; and the absence of management structures. 

Protection: DIGAR is concerned about the lack of capacity within the education community on psycho-affective recovery for children and their families. Crisis situations create problems at the individual, family, community and society levels, increasing risks and weakening protection support especially for children. This is particularly true for foster/care homes which lack emergency preparedness, having no contingency plans in place and no tools to provide psychosocial support. 

Housing organizations use different methodology and intervention criteria in a disaster. Prior interventions varied in quality and often excluded vulnerable groups such as PwD and migrants. Of a sample of 1,800 people in vulnerable communities, 80% cited the loss or temporary loss of their house as the greatest risk that their family faces in a natural disaster. The shelter cluster only focuses on temporary shelters. The National Housing Institute lacks protocols for emergencies and does not mitigate construction risks regarding vulnerable groups.Women recognized unidentified threats at community level, such as climate change and isolation in relation to safe routes. Adolescent girls have minimal control of resources/power and face increased risks of GBV and early pregnancy, especially in post-flood housing. Based on the needs assessment and in line with the HIP 2020 focus on regional and national multi-hazard preparedness for response, the proposed action is designed to ensure communities, national and local institutions, actors, and governments are better prepared to respond to disasters and have increased knowledge and tools in how to include protection and inclusion in their response. The proposal has a special emphasis on the migrant population in the Dominican Republic, which was identified as particularly vulnerable. The action will intervene at community, local, national, and regional/bi-national levels, targeting urban communities particularly exposed to multiple hazards with limited response capacity of local actors. 
 
The strategy addresses identified needs in disaster preparedness/response capacity; humanitarian protection; education and resilient construction. Across all four components, emphasis will be given to vulnerable population groups (PwD, migrants, woman and girls), by ensuring that gender, protection, and inclusion are cross-cutting. The proposed action is complementary to the ongoing ECHO bi-national project “Closing gaps” which is being implemented by Plan International, Oxfam, Habitat for Humanity, and Humanity and Inclusion in a consortium in both Cuba and the Dominican Republic with the specific objectives to: 1) strengthen municipal, national and regional NDMO (National Disaster Management Organizations) capacities for improving disaster preparedness and response, ensuring the inclusion of the most vulnerable people and with an emphasis on urban contexts; and 2) to promote inclusive strategies at municipal, national, bi-national and sub-regional levels for guaranteeing the rights of the most vulnerable people exposed to risk of disasters and uncertainty. Synergies will be created with this action by using, improving, and further disseminating its newly developed tools and strategies and following up on their application by communities and national actors. Lessons learned and recommendations will be taken into account for the proposed intervention, allowing to improve and scale up geographically the disaster preparedness initiatives. At community level, the selection criteria for the beneficiary population is to be in a situation of high socioeconomic vulnerability and high exposure to natural hazards. At institutional level, the selection criteria of the beneficiary institutions is to have a key role at national or local level either in DRM/disaster preparedness positions. This programme commits itself to the following 4 objectives:
1. Strengthening disaster preparedness and response capacity of community, local and national actors.
2. Integrating humanitarian protection in disaster preparedness with a gender and inclusion approach.
3. Strengthening disaster preparedness in the education sector using Safer Schools approach.
4. Promoting resilient construction.

In this project Plan will lead the regional, national, municipal and local communications component in the target cities in the Dominican Republic. At community level, Plan will lead the work aimed at strengthening the Civil Defense capacity to support Community PMR Networks. Plan has a long history of work with government institutions in charge of guaranteeing children’s rights to protection and education, particularly  the Ministry of Education/DIGAR and CONANI, with whom the organization has established collaboration agreements to promote the protection of children’s rights with a special focus on girls’ rights.