According to Michael Kaput, the recent lessons from Haiti and Chile have not gone unnoticed in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but regional governments remain hard to convince about the benefits of disaster preparedness he writes.
"[The governments] are engaged and they are committed to work on [disaster preparedness]," says Abu-Swaireh, UNISDR. "But I wouldn’t say it’s in the top five priorities right now because of a very simple reason: We’ve been lucky in the last decade that we haven’t lived through a Haiti."