Short training to improve knowledge of disaster management on basic level: A before and after study

Abstract

A massive effort to improve community resilience against disasters has been made by the Indonesian government. President Joko Widodo further emphasized this effort by ordering all governmental institutions and local governments to intensify disaster education for all the communities across Indonesia. As a contribution to this effort, Indonesia Defense University conducted a short training on basic disaster management for students, lecturers, and staffs. To evaluate the results of such training, a before-and-after study is used. The aim of this study is to examine if short training could improve participants’ knowledge in disaster management on a basic level. A pretest-posttest design was used to examine 105 participants’ knowledge before and after a five-day intervention consisting of eight basic disaster management courses regulated by the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB). The grading system is used to understand how much the improvement of each participant, with the possibility of failing if not meeting the score threshold. This study showed that most of the participants’ knowledge on basic disaster management have improved with varying results: 60 percent of participants passed with “excellent” mark, 22 percent passed with “very good” mark, 12 percent passed with “good” mark, and the remaining eight percent failed to pass. This study provides an opportunity for humanitarian actors to use such training in order to improve knowledge in basic disaster management as a means of disaster education. However, long-term evaluation for each participant is required to examine the impact of this training on disaster resilience on community scale.