<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The frequency of natural disasters and its negative consequences in terms of the number of people killed, property destroyed and negative environmental impacts caused in the affected communities constitute one of the basic foundations and motivations for the development and use of ICT and other means of preventing as well as responding to disasters in the world today. This is simply because disaster management constitutes an important part of any developmental framework. Unfortunately a majority of these natural disasters occur in developing countries where information flow is greatly hampered because the national actors in disasters lack the skills to use ICT to prepare for and to response to disasters in their communities. Current study aims at studying the use of ICT in disaster management in Cameroon-a less developing country south of the Sahara</p><p>To achieve the aim of this study, a quantitative research approach was chosen. A total sample of 150 organisations was selected from a population of 285 organisations within Cameroon, that are directly or indirectly involved with disaster management or developmental issues of any nature. In total 150 questionnaires were administered to these selected national actors by mail, internet, telephone and self-administration and 85 of the organisations respondended to the questionnaire.</p><p>After collecting and analysing the data, the authors came to the conclusions that; disasters occur in Cameroon on frequent bases causing lots of damages thus the need for ICT use in humanitarian logistics to move information and material. Results showed that national actors use the radio and local TV (CRTV) for disaster preparedness and the mobile phone for disaster response, while the internet and computer techonology, foreign TV, Fixed phone and fax had a very low usage rate or sometimes not used at all. The reason for low usage or no usage was due to problems encountered by national actors in an attempt of trying to use them. Against this background, the authors suggested a number of recommendations that could improve the degree of ICT usage. One of them was that the Cameroon government should partner with private sector firms to make ICT infrastructure available by investing more and improving on the telecommunication sector in the country. This will solve the problem of poor ICT infrastructure, poor radio and TV signals, limited internet connectivity accessibility and availability in Cameroon.<strong></strong></p>

<p>The extent of a community experiencing social vulnerability depends on the community&rsquo / s ability to access resources that may contribute to coping mechanisms (either within the household or provided externally by a responsible authority) that decrease the impacts and effects of a disaster. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to identify the existence of social and institutional mechanisms that aim to reduce experiences of water inaccessibility and the causes of social vulnerability, and increase coping mechanisms within Kayamandi. Kayamandi is a low income residential community on the north-westerly periphery of the greater Stellenbosch town in the Western Cape. The research attained&nbsp / responses through questionnaires and surveys from residents, community organisations and responsible personnel. These surveys allowed the researcher to produce raw attribute data for each household that assisted in spatially representing vulnerable households and informing the five priority areas of the Hyogo Framework for Action. Contributing to this method of attaining information, secondary geographic data collection was obtained through the Stellenbosch Local Municipality, the National Geospatial Information Directorate and the National Demarcation Board. The findings of this thesis established that household and public water infrastructure contribute to the risk of experiencing social vulnerability that affects economic standings and quality of health within the community. Contributing to this and due to Kayamandi&rsquo / s politically sensitive and historically fractioned community, social cohesion has also been noted as an area of vulnerability. Although these vulnerabilities are experienced, residents are able to implement technical, social and municipal reliant coping mechanisms. However, although efforts from Stellenbosch Local Municipality do respond to most of the key indicators within the Hyogo Framework for Action, the study found no concrete efforts within the Stellenbosch Local Municipality that illustrate integrated mechanisms to reduce the impacts of disasters and compound effects.</p>

<p>The extent of a community experiencing social vulnerability depends on the community&rsquo / s ability to access resources that may contribute to coping mechanisms (either within the household or provided externally by a responsible authority) that decrease the impacts and effects of a disaster. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to identify the existence of social and institutional mechanisms that aim to reduce experiences of water inaccessibility and the causes of social vulnerability, and increase coping mechanisms within Kayamandi. Kayamandi is a low income residential community on the north-westerly periphery of the greater Stellenbosch town in the Western Cape. The research attained&nbsp / responses through questionnaires and surveys from residents, community organisations and responsible personnel. These surveys allowed the researcher to produce raw attribute data for each household that assisted in spatially representing vulnerable households and informing the five priority areas of the Hyogo Framework for Action. Contributing to this method of attaining information, secondary geographic data collection was obtained through the Stellenbosch Local Municipality, the National Geospatial Information Directorate and the National Demarcation Board. The findings of this thesis established that household and public water infrastructure contribute to the risk of experiencing social vulnerability that affects economic standings and quality of health within the community. Contributing to this and due to Kayamandi&rsquo / s politically sensitive and historically fractioned community, social cohesion has also been noted as an area of vulnerability. Although these vulnerabilities are experienced, residents are able to implement technical, social and municipal reliant coping mechanisms. However, although efforts from Stellenbosch Local Municipality do respond to most of the key indicators within the Hyogo Framework for Action, the study found no concrete efforts within the Stellenbosch Local Municipality that illustrate integrated mechanisms to reduce the impacts of disasters and compound effects.</p>

Final Thesis, Master of Business Administration &amp; Economic Program, Field of Research: Management, School of Business &amp; Economics at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, 4FE10E, Spring 2015. Author: David Häggberg Supervisor: Richard Nakamura (Daniel Ericsson) Title: Ground-Breaking Contingency Planning with Risk- &amp; Disaster Management Subtitle: A Case Study at Höganäs Japan K.K. Background: On the 11th of March 2011, Japan was hit with one of the largestearthquakes in modern history at a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale. Thiscaused wide spreading and lasting delays in production in large parts of the worlddue to organizations supply chain being connected to Japan. Subsequently RiskManagement has received renewed and increasing attention, both in Japan and therest of the world. The proactive concept of Risk Management primary builds itsmodels around probability and utilizes this concept as a basis for determining whichrisks that should be mitigated through countermeasures and financial investments.Though when faced with an environment filled with uncertainty and an additionallevel of indirect risk exposure due to the potential domino effect of natural disasterssuch as earthquakes, can Risk Management really handle that, a world whereprobability fails? The reactive approach used by Disaster Management mightcontain clues for making Risk Management more flexible. Research Question: How can a transnational corporation adapt their RiskManagement strategy and plan for contingencies in a country with an unstablenatural environment? Purpose: This thesis seeks to investigate how a strategy for Risk Management canbe created and adapted with the regard to uncertainties such as an unstableenvironmental situation. The goal is further to highlight how traditional RiskManagement can be combined with other related areas such as DisasterManagement, in order to make a more complete strategy and a more flexible plan foraction. An adaption to the Risk Management strategy that would be made in order tomake the strategy applicable on a global level and including areas with unstableenvironmental situations. Method: This study has utilized a multi-strategy approach and the main source ofdata for this case study has come from semi-structured interviews and acomplementary survey. The author has found it necessary to adopt a pragmaticstandpoint with a qualitative focus in order to explore the research question andunderstand the collected data to its fullest extent. Conclusion: Adopting the local practices and mindset that strives to constantlysecure the supply chain and fulfill customer obligations by creating contingenciesthe risk exposure can be mitigated. Utilizing a quickly adaptable approach instead oflong-term planning in combination with concepts such as a Disaster Recovery Planthe Risk Management strategy can be altered towards becoming more flexible.

The extent of a community experiencing social vulnerability depends on the community’s ability to access resources that may contribute to coping mechanisms (either within the household or provided externally by a responsible authority) that decrease the impacts and effects of a disaster. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to identify the existence of social and institutional mechanisms that aim to reduce experiences of water inaccessibility and the causes of social vulnerability, and increase coping mechanisms within Kayamandi. Kayamandi is a low income residential community on the north-westerly periphery of the greater Stellenbosch town in the Western Cape. The research attained responses through questionnaires and surveys from residents, community organisations and responsible personnel. These surveys allowed the researcher to produce raw attribute data for each household that assisted in spatially representing vulnerable households and informing the five priority areas of the Hyogo Framework for Action. Contributing to this method of attaining information, secondary geographic data collection was obtained through the Stellenbosch Local Municipality, the National Geospatial Information Directorate and the National Demarcation Board. The findings of this thesis established that household and public water infrastructure contribute to the risk of experiencing social vulnerability that affects economic standings and quality of health within the community. Contributing to this and due to Kayamandi’s politically sensitive and historically fractioned community, social cohesion has also been noted as an area of vulnerability. Although these vulnerabilities are experienced, residents are able to implement technical, social and municipal reliant coping mechanisms. However, although efforts from Stellenbosch Local Municipality do respond to most of the key indicators within the Hyogo Framework for Action, the study found no concrete efforts within the Stellenbosch Local Municipality that illustrate integrated mechanisms to reduce the impacts of disasters and compound effects. / Magister Artium - MA

The focus of the study is to explore Geographic patterns and Disasters Management in the context of Alexandra Township situated in the Johannesburg Metro. The research evaluates if the Disaster Management Unit in Johannesburg municipality is prepared in terms of policies, community campaigns on flood disasters as well as forming organizations that will assist in times of disaster. It also refers to other South African townships with regard to where most affected townships are located, how the community is affected and how the local government responds. Disaster management infers preparedness for disaster; therefore, measures of preparation from the local government need to be in place to reduce extreme losses, pro-active policies should be in place to guide officials on how to manage disasters affecting their areas. The South African local government as the third sphere of government is closest to the people and mostly responsible for the community’s wellbeing. It is for this reason that local governments should have a strategy on how to deal with disaster. Having experienced natural disaster incidents, most countries in the world have been compelled to develop legislations, disaster management and mitigation plans that guide them on how to prevent and respond to disasters. In view of a several unimagined disaster incidents in South Africa, the researcher maintains that the concept and practice of disaster management is rather new in South Africa, and many local governments do not have well-informed strategies to manage natural disasters. Unlimited rain caused by climate change, the position of residence and overpopulation can be major attributes to disasters hazards. Floods can easily flow into residential dwellings and destroy the property, not only that, but it can also result in the loss of lives and enhance the spread of diseases. It becomes more of tragedy as most people living in these areas are poor and have all their belongings in the same place which makes them even more vulnerable to disaster. The location of Stjwetla settlement along the Alexandra Township riverbanks becomes relevant at this point in case. The residents of Stjwetla are exposed to flood threats, they are very much aware of the risk associated with the low-lying geographical patterns, overpopulation and the riverbanks. However, they still occupy the disaster prone sites because they cannot afford elsewhere. Stjwetla is an illegal settlement where no one pays rent; there is a serious lack of basic municipal services such as water and electricity in the area. The residents claim to have arrived in this area simply because Johannesburg seems to offer informal job opportunities; therefore, they anticipate good opportunities in terms of employment. Most of them are from Limpopo province and have more than twenty years residing in Stjwetla, and are still unemployed. The community has formed rescue groups that help in times of regular disasters such as floods and fire. The rescue groups also mediate between the community and the northern Johannesburg municipal Disaster and Emergency Unit. The Disaster and Emergency Unit have formed good relations with the community leaders for support and emergency response. Other organizations, for instance Red Cross Society make regular input, by offering food and clothes to the people affected. Red Cross Society and other organizations work together with the local government to help Stjwetla residents deal better with disaster effects. However, the residents feel that other government departments, such as social development, health and housing must assist as well. Residents are of an idea that the disaster management unit alone cannot conquer the disaster risk in Stjwetla but social development should help with psychological therapy while health department should intervene to reduce long-term effects of injuries. / M, Development and Management, Public Management and Administration, North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2012

Despite disaster managers’ best efforts, inter-organizational disaster management suffers from varying levels of success. One factor that is likely to account for these variations is team mutual understanding, also known as common ground. To validate the potential effect of common ground in disaster management, the thesis investigates common ground in several interviews with disaster managers and in an experimental study involving an inter-organizational disaster event scenario. Analysis of interviews revealed that disaster managers perceived gaps in understanding between responders, the importance of mutual understanding, and perceived common ground similarly to depictions in theory with a few exceptions. Analyses of the experimental study indicated that contextual factors of Team composition, Problem solving approach and Type of tasks differently impacted measures of performance and implicit coordination, and that implicit coordination partially mediated and supressed the relationship between contextual factors and decision quality. Findings suggest the variation in disaster managers’ performance can be ascribed to common ground, implicit coordination, and contextual factors. Moreover, results showed the satisfaction with outcome did not correlate with expert rated quality of decision; and that while satisfaction related to consensus and quality of the decision was linked to generating alternative ideas and debate. Collaboration proved to be more effective in public communication tasks, especially for homogenous team composition. The findings support initiatives for more cross-training and further lab and field experiments.

Many recent developments in education theory and the field of disaster management have left the meaning of public education as applied in the disaster management field fraught with uncertainty. This thesis addresses this uncertainty via a phenomenographic research study that sheds light on the meaning of public education, despite such uncertainty, by revealing a discrete number of qualitatively different ways in which disaster managers and disaster educators experience and understand public education. Transcriptions of interviews of 25 such senior Australian disaster managers and educators were analysed using phenomenographic methods and revealed a set of discrete, parsimonious and qualitatively different ways of experiencing public education. The referential component of the different ways of experiencing was revealed within ten emergent categories of description for public education: (i) a non-effective process; (ii) a way of managing a public issue; (iii) promoting an issue; (iv) issuing expert instructions; (v) changing individuals; (vi) strategic teaching and training; (vii) collaborative partnerships; (viii) empowering learners to make informed decisions; (ix) negotiation; and (x) element in societal learning. The structural component of the emergent ways of experiencing public education was presented in the form of a phenomenographic outcome space. Linkages between these findings about public education and current literature were made. The results suggested multiple ways to improve public education within the disaster management community and more widely. The need for clarity in communication amongst educators and professionals in regard to public education was confirmed by the research findings. Insights into phenomenography and education were included within the discussion.

This study focuses on records management in support of service delivery in the public health sector of Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study sought to investigate whether the current records-keeping practices support or undermine service delivery and the e-health readiness level. Mixed methods were used for the survey. Questionnaires, observation and interviews were used to collect data. Purposive sampling method was used to identify interview participants and stratified random sampling for questionnaire participants. The total population of the study was 324 from which 210 participants were sampled. The response rate was 77% (162). The study discovered that records management negatively affected timely and effective health care services. This resulted in long patient waiting times and patients being treated without their medical history records. The study recommended the introduction of an electronic records management system capable of capturing and providing access to a full patient record and tracking paper record movement. / Information Science

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Doina Caragea / Twitter is one of the most active social media sites today. Almost everyone is using it, as it is a medium by which people stay in touch and inform others about events in their lives. Among many other types of events, people tweet about disaster events. Both man made and natural disasters, unfortunately, occur all the time. When these tragedies transpire, people tend to cope in their own ways. One of the most popular ways people convey their feelings towards disaster events is by offering or asking for support, providing valuable information about the disaster, and voicing their disapproval towards those who may be the cause. However, not all of the tweets posted during a disaster are guaranteed to be useful or informative to authorities nor to the general public. As the number of tweets that are posted during a disaster can reach the hundred thousands range, it is necessary to automatically distinguish tweets that provide useful information from those that don't. Manual annotation cannot scale up to the large number of tweets, as it takes significant time and effort, which makes it unsuitable for real-time disaster tweet annotation. Alternatively, supervised machine learning has been traditionally used to learn classifiers that can quickly annotate new unseen tweets. But supervised machine learning algorithms make use of labeled training data from the disaster of interest, which is presumably not available for a current target disaster. However, it is reasonable to assume that some amount of labeled data is available for a prior source disaster. Therefore, domain adaptation algorithms that make use of labeled data from a source disaster to learn classifiers for the target disaster provide a promising direction in the area of tweet classification for disaster management. In prior work, domain adaptation algorithms have been trained based on tweets represented as bag-of-words. In this research, I studied the effect of Part of Speech (POS) tag unigrams and bigrams on the performance of the domain adaptation classifiers. Specifically, I used POS tag unigram and bigram features in conjunction with a Naive Bayes Domain Adaptation algorithm to learn classifiers from source labeled data together with target unlabeled data, and subsequently used the resulting classifiers to classify target disaster tweets. The main research question addressed through this work was if the POS tags can help improve the performance of the classifiers learned from tweet bag-of-words representations only. Experimental results have shown that the POS tags can improve the performance of the classifiers learned from words only, but not always. Furthermore, the results of the experiments show that POS tag bigrams contain more information as compared to POS tag unigrams, as the classifiers learned from bigrams have better performance than those learned from unigrams.