RAPID International (RI) is an umbrella organization that brings together the disaster response and preparedness experience, skills and knowledge drawn from individuals and organisations across the UK and overseas who will form an extended database. This experienced database of personnel will be used to develop and implement training to all disaster prone areas through training to respond, mitigate and prepare for disasters or emergency situations. Our own personnel have amassed a vast amount of experience through responding to disaster around the world from the earthquake in Armenia 1988 through to the Philippines Typhoon in 2013 and the development and delivery of 87 projects world-wide. RAPID-International will work with NGO’s, GO’s and educational facilities to deliver important and sustainable programs

Personnel are drawn from a number of organisations with a wealth of the relevant skills and experience to meet the requirement, these include:

• RAPID-UK
• UK Fire Service personnel
• Medical Service personnel
• Experienced personnel from other NGO’s
• University Disaster Management Facilities
• Military (specific skill sets)

Goal

Our goal is to help reduce the damaging effects that disasters and daily emergency situations can have on people’s lives, livelihoods and futures. We do this by offering well practiced experienced training teams who have a well established and proved track record across the world.

 

Planning for disaster or emergency situations is carried out at Government, Local Government and Community levels, we believe in a top to bottom and a bottom to top approach to ensure planning is at all levels and is understood and more importantly will work when required. We consider the basis for a successful project is a comprehensive assessment using the rationale of hazard, risk and vulnerability and measuring this against capacity. This will form the basis of the methodology for any projects and an important part of any RAPID International project development ensuring sustainability. Project planning will be based on the assessment findings and will address key vulnerabilities, building on capacity where required and then matching skill sets to meet the need.

Preparedness at government and community level is vitally important if lives and livelihoods are to be saved and protected therefore linking governments, local governments and communities are a key element of this stage. Governments and local governments have the responsibility to ensure suitable preparedness and mitigation measures are in place through suitable resilience and preparation measures, RAPID-International works with governments and local governments to deliver and advise on risk reduction measures, best practice and sustainability. Vulnerable communities in disaster prone countries are also a focus of RAPID-International support, these communities normally suffer the most when disaster strikes, they are well aware of their risks and are normally extremely resilient, however by increasing community awareness and implementing sometimes simple risk reduction measures the overall preparedness can be heightened thus saving more lives when disaster strikes.

RAPID-International are able to provide training at the national and community response levels through its experienced personnel who have responded to major disasters over the past three decades gaining experiences at all response levels. The planning and preparedness measures are a vitally important part of the response element, when disaster strikes or  a serious emergency situation occurs it is important that the in-country response is suitable and sufficient. Over the past three decades our personnel have trained ‘search and rescue teams‘ at government and local government levels and ‘response teams‘ at community levels. The training of and mobilisation of community response plays a key role in disaster and emergency impact reduction.

Our training teams are all extremely experienced in disaster response at the global level and are fully trained response personnel. Each member of our training team has a recognised specialist skill set including, emergency planning, engineering, logistics, disaster recovery, fire, medical, rescue, water rescue, community resilience and mobilisation all of which enables RAPID-International to provide a holistic and sustainable solution to the challenges that people affected by disasters face.

All RAPID International personnel are volunteers whose sole aim is to better prepare vulnerable communities prior to  disasters or catastrophic event and to respond more effectively when an event occurs.