Via Mark and his remarkable team at Internews
Following an assessment mission from Jakarta, Internews is making a public appeal for donations of radio sets to isolated villages in the earthquake zone around Yogyakarta.
According to Reuters Alertnet, over 1.5 million people were made homeless by last month’s earthquake, three times the number uprooted by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Yet donors and the public have come up with only a third of the money needed for relief efforts.
Internews sent an assessment team from Jakarta including local managers Wayne Sharpe and Eric Sasono to visit local media in the zone of Yogyakarta, where an earthquake struck on May 27, killing over 6,000 people. The team talked to people made homeless in the quake zones, and asked what information they needed and how best they could get it. The answer was radio.
18 euros ($22, 13 GBP) will buy a radio with built-in flashlight and spare batteries to be distributed to village heads in the region, enabling them to get vital information about the reconstruction effort to their villagers. An initial supply of 100 radio sets for key villages will delivered via the distribution mechanisms of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who have offered to combine this with their other relief services on the ground.
To donate go to http://www.internews.fr/article.php3?id_article=56
For more on the role of information and local media support in disasters see http://www.developments.org.uk/
