UNDDR Director Kirsi Madi who is now joining Unicef as Chief of Staff

GENEVA, 5 December, 2019 - When a little girl in China takes the trouble to write and thank you for helping to save her life in an earthquake you must be doing something right.

The letter was written 25 years ago to the Unicef focal point for disaster risk reduction, Kirsi Madi, to let her know that when the girl was alone at home, she took cover from falling masonry under a table as soon as she felt an earthquake. This was thanks to what she remembered from playing a risk-themed board game Kirsi had developed.

“DRR is a matter of life and death,” Kirsi said as she reflected this week on a busy three years as Director of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and on the eve of her departure to take on the role of Chief of Staff at one of the UN’s largest and most well-known agencies, Unicef.

Following her early field experiences as a Unicef JPO in Liberia and Iraq, Kirsi was seconded to the secretariat for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction which eventually gave rise to the creation twenty years ago of UNDRR.

She looks back on the last three years with some pride and a sense of accomplishment at the significant progress in efforts to implement the global plan to reduce disaster losses, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

There are now 103 countries reporting on their disaster losses for 2018 ensuring that their progress can be measured on reducing disaster losses across four key targets of the Sendai Framework: reducing mortality, numbers of people affected, economic losses and damage to critical infrastructure.

Her role was informed by her participation in the preparations for the first World Conference on Natural Disaster Reduction in Yokohama in 1994 which set the pattern for the two world conferences which followed in 2005 and 2015 and successive plans for reducing disaster losses through better risk management.