CDP makes communities disaster-resilient, and it works.

Years of Service

🏛️

27

+

Empowering Filipino communities in disaster preparedness since 1999

Direct Participants Trained

👥

55,701

+

Individuals directly trained in disaster risk reduction and management

Systemic Stakeholders

🤝

2,962,576

+

Community members reached through our partner organizations and programs

Partner Communities

🏘️

544

+

Barangays and communities engaged in disaster preparedness programs

Provinces Covered

📍

33

+

Provinces across the Philippines where CDP has worked

Training Sessions Conducted

📚

2,183

+

Disaster risk reduction training sessions delivered since 1999

Projects Completed

✅

127

+

CBDRRM, research, advocacy, and humanitarian response projects since 1999

Municipalities Reached

🗺️

110

+

Cities and municipalities across the Philippines where CDP has operated

2025 Training Sessions

📋

190

+

Training and capacity building sessions delivered across all programs in 2025

2025 Community-Led Actions

🌱

291

+

DRR and climate adaptation actions documented in 2025 — exceeding annual targets by 43%

ICBDRRM Volunteers Trained

🤲

180

+

Community members mentored as ICBDRRM-AA facilitators, now leading preparedness in their own barangays

For 27 years — since 1999 — CDP Foundation has worked alongside communities, local governments, and civil society organizations across the Philippines to build something that outlasts any project or program: resilience through community-led development. Our work is not about delivering aid. It is about ensuring that the 2.96 million Filipinos in our partner communities already know what to do before the typhoon hits, before the earthquake strikes, and long after the cameras leave.

Our vision: safe, resilient, and thriving communities — where every person, regardless of age, ability, gender, or circumstance, is an active agent of their own disaster preparedness and recovery.

Resilience Starts with Empowered Communities

At CDP Foundation, we believe that the most powerful form of resilience is the kind of resilience communities build for themselves. Since our founding in 1999, we have partnered with 544+ communities across 33 provinces — from the coastal barangays of Camarines Norte to the highlands of Benguet to the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao — equipping local leaders, women's organizations, youth groups, and people with disabilities with the tools and knowledge to lead their own disaster risk reduction.

In 2025 alone, CDP delivered 190 training programs, supported 291 community-led disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation actions, and mentored 180 ICBDRRM volunteers across the Anticipatory and Humanitarian Action Program, and engaged 471 unique stakeholders through the DKH partnership. Whether through localizing humanitarian action, supporting survivor- and community-led recovery, or nurturing community-driven innovation, CDP is committed to one thing: amplifying what communities already know how to do, and giving them the space to lead.

Our Unique Approach

CDP began in 1999 as the training desk of the Citizens' Disaster Response Center. Today, we are recognized by the Office of Civil Defense as the national hub for Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (CBDRRM) in the Philippines — and our work reaches from local barangay planning rooms to the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai.

What sets us apart is not our scale, but our method. Our four core approaches are:

Inclusive CBDRRM (ICBDRRM) — We train communities using a learner-centered, participatory approach that integrates the perspectives of children and youth, women, persons with disabilities, and indigenous peoples. Our training methodology became the national standard: the CBDRRM Basic Instructors Guide (BIG), co-developed with JICA and the Office of Civil Defense, is now the official training module used by local government staff nationwide.
Survivor- and Community-Led Resilience (SCLR) — Through programs like SHARPER and YIELDS, communities are not beneficiaries of resilience — they are its architects. In 2025, partner communities under SCLR drove 291 locally-initiated actions in flood preparedness, climate adaptation, livelihood recovery, and ecosystem protection.
Anticipatory Action (AA) — CDP works with communities and local governments to put plans and resources in place before disasters strike, not after. In 2025, 5 AA proposals were approved and funded through our partnerships with DKH and other humanitarian actors.
Grantmaking (ACSF) — Through the Abot-Kamay Community Solidarity Fund (ACSF), CDP channels direct resources to people's organizations and community groups — recognizing and leveraging the existing assets, strengths, and capacities that communities already hold.
Across all four approaches, CDP's work is guided by the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus — integrating disaster risk reduction, climate resilience, and peacebuilding so that our interventions address not just the hazard, but the root causes of vulnerability.

Local Solutions for Global Challenges

The communities most exposed to disaster — along typhoon corridors, beside flood-prone rivers, on landslide-vulnerable hillsides — are also the communities most capable of finding solutions, when given the chance.

CDP's Pinnovation Academy (Pinoy Innovation Academy) proved this. In Phase 1 alone, 15 community-led innovation projects — from a solar-powered emergency radio system in the Visayas, to a women-managed mangrove conservation area in Mindanao, to accessible transport for persons with disabilities in Las Piñas — reached 32,908 indirect beneficiaries. These innovations survived their first real test when Typhoon Paeng struck in 2022: the merged fishing gear was the only one still standing in the storm; the bamboo dike held; the indigenous healing center was distributing medicines to flood-affected communities 30 kilometers away from the project site.

CDP's work on climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCAM), gender-responsive DRRM, disability-inclusive resilience (DiDRRM), and ecosystem-based approaches is grounded in the same principle: local communities are not the problem. They are the solution. Our role is to help them access the resources, recognition, and policy space they deserve.

Building a Movement for Lasting Change

CDP's work has never been limited to the project site. Since 2002, we have been a leading voice in the movement to reshape Philippine disaster policy — organizing the 1st National Conference on Community-Based Disaster Management, forming the Philippine Disaster Management Forum (PDMF), and leading the civil society coalition that secured the passage of Republic Act 10121 in 2010, the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act.

Today, as Lead Convener of DRRNetPhils and an active member of global networks including GNDR (Global Network of Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction), NEAR Network, ALNAP, ARISE, and the ADRRN, CDP continues to bring Filipino community voices to the global stage — advocating for policies that put people at the center of disaster governance.

As part of the global #ShiftThePower movement, we are committed to democratizing aid and philanthropy: ensuring that resources flow to, and decisions rest with, the people on the frontlines. We are building a movement — across communities, local governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector — for resilience systems that endure long after any external project has ended.

In 2026, CDP commits to deepening this movement: expanding into underserved communities in Mindanao and conflict-affected areas, establishing a permanent learning center, building our endowment for long-term sustainability, and growing the next generation of Filipino CBDRRM leaders.

Padayon. Let us continue — together.

27 Years of Community-Led Resilience.
Because Communities Are the First Responders.

The Center for Disaster Preparedness (CDP) Foundation trains, equips, and empowers Filipino communities to survive and lead through disasters — before the world shows up, and long after it leaves.

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Statement of the Board of Trustees

Call For Accountability Amidst Corruption

in Flood Control and Other Infrastructure Projects

Money stolen from disaster prevention is protection stolen from communities.

Between August and early September 2026, the enhanced southwest monsoon and tropical cyclones Luis, Maymay, and Neneng killed at least 32 people, affected 8.1 million Filipinos across ten regions, and caused ₱8.48 billion in damage. 117 local governments declared a state of calamity.

We read almost the same sentence in 2025. And in 2024.

This is no longer a disaster that arrives without warning. It is a pattern, and our community partners can name its parts precisely: shifting weather, eroding livelihood, deepening climate risk vulnerability, and layered on top of both, the theft of the very funds meant to hold back the water.

The Center for Disaster Preparedness Foundation has worked in Inclusive Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction and Management since 1999. Over 27 years, we have accompanied 302 barangay communities across 107 cities and municipalities in 33 provinces. Nine of the ten regions flooded this August are places where we work, among them Pampanga, Pangasinan, Bataan, Aurora, Camarines Norte and Metro Manila. We do not speak about this from a distance, and we do not speak for ourselves.

Between July 2022 and May 2025, ₱545.6 billion was appropriated for flood control. An estimated ₱118 billion of it is believed lost to anomalous, substandard, and ghost projects, and ₱100 billion went to just fifteen contractors out of 2,409. Set that beside what communities do with a fraction of it. In Barangay Bagumbayan North in Navotas, among the areas that drew flood control allocations year after year while floodgates sat unrepaired, residents have cleared their own canals, hauled out their own debris and built their own path walks on small community grants. Across 16 provinces, more than ₱39 million in grants from CDP Foundation has carried 61 community-led actions. We are in Eastern Samar, Northern Samar, Camarines Norte, Aurora, Bataan and Metro Manila today, working with women and young people on anticipatory action, community early warning systems and locally led risk reduction.

Communities do with thousands what billions were appropriated to do and failed to do.

This is what corruption in flood control actually costs. Not an accounting discrepancy: displacement, ruined harvests, lost livelihoods, illness and death, borne by people promised protection who paid for it twice. CDP has pressed this case for more than two decades, through advocacy on the rules governing DRRM fund access and use, the sunset review of Republic Act 10121, and our work with DRRNet Philippines. We now make these urgent calls:

Hold all those responsible fully accountable. Lahat ng sangkot, dapat managot. Pursue plunder, malversation, and graft cases to conviction. Blacklist complicit contractors and the officials who certified their work. No selective accountability, and no convenient scapegoats.
Return recovered resources to disaster risk reduction. Recovered funds and assets should, consistent with law and public financial accountability mechanisms, rebuild the protection communities were denied.
Pursue holistic flood mitigation and prevention. Concrete alone has not saved us. Mitigation must include nature-based and eco-based measures and honor local and indigenous knowledge.
Make community participation binding, not decorative. Affected communities must sit in the planning, procurement oversight, inspection and validation of every project built in their name, as key actors and not beneficiaries.
Invest in what is already proven to work. Survivor and community-led response, anticipatory action, resilient livelihoods and inclusive preparedness deserve public investment matching what they deliver.
Genuinely commit to strengthening livelihoods and alleviating poverty. Poverty is what turns a hazard into a disaster. Infrastructure alone will not change who gets displaced and who recovers, so the same budgets must reach land tenure, decent work and social protection.

None of this is corrected by a single investigation. It demands sustained attention, sustained investment and collective action from all of us. The question is not only whether public money was lost, but whether those entrusted with public resources fulfilled their duty to protect the Filipino people. Every peso lost weakens our capacity to protect a community, and the next flood is already forming over the sea.

Let every peso for disaster preparedness, mitigation and prevention count. Let every public official and contractor entrusted with those resources answer. Let every life, livelihood and community be valued.

CENTER FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS FOUNDATION, INC.

September 2026

Signed by the Board of Trustees:

DR. CELY BINOYA

President

DR. EMMANUEL LUNA

Vice President

EUFEMIA ANDAYA

Secretary

CARMEL PAMI-ULANDAY

Treasurer

ADELINA SEVILLA-ALVAREZ