Figure 6: ASEAN-ERAT Missions, the First 12 Years

in 2018, 45 members deployed in the wake of five disasters, many of them simultaneous and catastrophic. Figure 6 is an infographic detailing the ASEAN-ERAT response throughout the region during the first 12 years of the group’s operation; this includes the four years of ERAT before the AHA Centre was founded.31 Also since the AHA Centre’s founding in 2012, its DELSA, with its main warehouse in Subang, Malaysia, has facilitated swift provision of relief items. In 2019, two satellite warehouses were established in the Philippines and Thailand to ensure faster mobilization of relief items.32

COVID-19 – 2020-2022

A Special Meeting of the Governing Board of the AHA Centre on 15 May 2020 worked through the AHA Centre’s options for pandemic response and support. The result was a decision to make Mobile Storage Units (MSU), hygiene kits, and prefabricated offices from the DELSA available to ASEAN member-states during the pandemic. NDMOs would need to request these items to plug operational gaps in their national responses.

During the second half of 2020, AHA Centre DELSA stockpiles were used to assist pandemic responses in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Cambodia. In collaboration with the Philippines’ Office of Civil Defense, the AHA Centre supported local efforts via the DELSA Satellite Warehouse at Camp General Aguinaldo, Quezon City. There were 5,000 personal hygiene kits distributed to different local government quarantine sites across regions. In addition, the AHA Centre supported Malaysia’s National Disaster Management Agency to mobilize an MSU and a prefabricated office from the DELSA Regional Stockpile in Subang, Malaysia. Finally, the AHA Centre worked with the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) of Thailand to mobilize 2,900 hygiene kits and an MSU from the DELSA Satellite Warehouse in Chainat, Thailand, to be used by Cambodia in their national pandemic response.

Towards the end of 2020, the Government of Thailand also approached the AHA Centre for pandemic response support amidst a COVID-19 outbreak in Samut Sakhon Province where over 4,000 immigrant fisheries workers arriving from neighboring ASEAN member-states were in quarantine. Relief items delivered included 500 family tents, 2,000 mosquito nets, and 1,500 personal hygiene kits from the DELSA Satellite Warehouse in Chainat in December 2020 and January 2021.33 Later in January 2021, facilitated by Thailand’s DDPM, the AHA Centre mobilized ASEAN relief items, comprised of 500 personal hygiene kits from the DELSA Satellite Warehouse in Chainat for delivery to Nonthaburi Province