NBI launches toolkit on business emergency

Kathmandu, July 29: In order to provide support measures to help business prepare for emergency, a toolkit on business emergency preparedness is published Friday.

Titled as ‘Emergency Preparedness and Response Planning for Business: A Guide and Self-Assessment’, the guidebook aims at guiding the business managers for better emergency preparedness practices within the companies through six easy steps.

The book was unveiled by chief executive officer of the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) Sushil Gyawali amidst a programme.

Gyawali said that the government had given priority to economic rebuilding. “However, more efforts are needed to reconstruct and rehabilitate small, cottage and medium industries in the quake affected areas.”

He stated that the private sector had an important role to play in the reconstruction works.

Appreciating the role of private sector and civil society in rescue and relief works after the major jolts in April and May last year, Gyawali said that production, employment generation and financial inclusion needed strong coordination with the private sector.

President of the National Business Initiative (NBI) Padma Jyoti said that the Nepalese businesses were not prepared at all for emergencies.

“There was no management system in place to anticipate, plan and resolve such conditions of emergencies. Consequently, critical areas of business such as operations, employee safety, cash flows, supply chains, distribution chains were hit hard and business managers had a difficult time trying to navigate through such uncertain situations,” he said in his foreword in the book.

He said that the private sector was capable of supplying the construction materials required in the reconstruction process but the government should facilitate the business in multiple fronts from energy to infrastructure.

Jyoti informed that the NBI and National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) will provide further support services required by business to start developing the emergency preparedness systems within the industry of workplace. 

Executive director of NSET Amod Mani Dixit urged the private sector to practice hazard and vulnerability assessment.

“It became evidently that without the active involvement of the private sector, the country’s aspiration of shifting the paradigm from the traditional concept of disaster relief to the culture of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) including disaster preparedness cannot be achieved,” he said.

The book is published by the NBI and NSET.