Capacity Building on "Risk Financing to Manage Climate and Disaster Shocks in Bangladesh"

The goal of this project was to strengthen the capacity towards risk financing to manage the high cost from disaster and climate shocks. For this, an innovative workshop was organized to address the issues related to disaster and climate risk financing Bangladesh including participants and delegates from the Government of Bangladesh officials (with focus on Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief and Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change), NGO & INGO practitioners, officials from donor agencies and financial institutions.

Disaster Risk Finance is necessary for increasing the speed, predictability and transparency of disaster response and early recovery, ensuring support reaches people who need it the most and when they need it the most, based on a robust risk financial planning and operational mechanism. This aims to protect investments in human development and productive assets and planning on how to meet the cost of possible disasters before they happen keeping the vulnerability, exposure and likelihood of a hazard in consideration.

Considering the impacts of disaster in the economic sectors Bangladesh need to adopt a vibrant disaster risk financing mechanism. To address this, BRAC Climate Change Programme (CCP) and Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Research (C3ER), BRAC University have jointly organized a workshop on Climate and Disaster Risk Financing in Bangladesh: Best Practices and Knowledge Sharing with support from the World Bank Group on 6-8 March 2019 and 11-13 March 2019 at BRAC CDM Rajendrapur. The participants of this workshop were representatives from different NGOs, INGOs, Government Ministries and Departments who are involved in activities related to disaster risk reduction, climate financing and disaster management. The goal of this workshop was to increase the participants’ competency in disaster risk financing and enable them to know, understand, formulate or assist to formulate and apply risk finance in the context of Bangladesh more effectively and to encouraged the participants to share their learning’s from the workshop with their respective organizations.

The objective of the Climate and Disaster Risk Financing in Bangladesh: Best Practices and Knowledge Sharing workshop was:

• Strengthening the understanding of climate change and disaster risk financing among the policy makers.
• Enabling risk finance for the most vulnerable community impacted by climate change and natural disasters through effective policy implementation and institutional reformation.

Client: World Bank Group

Project Duration: December 2018 – April 2019

Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh