One important priority is funding. As noted by Edmon Azaryan, Head of the ARC’s Disaster Management and Population Movement Department, “given that the only disaster risk reduction funds assigned by Armenian legislation are the national government and local communities’ budgets and that neither have allocated funds for disaster preparedness and prevention, the Armenian Red Cross finds it critical to encourage community authorities to change their policies and assign special financial lines for DRR. Such a bottom-up approach helps to secure funds and ensure proper attention to DRR”.
One community team has already been successful in persuading local authorities to mandate that 10% of community funds from the local annual budget would be dedicated to DRR activities aiming at improving resilience to disasters.
As a next step, community-based “coordination commissions,” conceived to manage risk reduction activities and link with government, will be created. These will also include representatives of partner NGOs and will build on these resilience building initiatives for advocacy at the national level to ensure political and public commitment to reduce the risk of disasters and promote changes in national DRR policies and legislation.