By: Laurel Marewibuel
KOROR, Palau (January 22, 2026)— In a Pacific island chain where cutting-edge tech often lags, Palau’s National Emergency Management Office (NEMO) leans hard on human networks and community smarts to blast life-saving alerts to the vulnerable—especially people with disabilities and non-English-speaking immigrants during crises like droughts and typhoons.
NEMO Director Waymine Towai, steering the agency through Palau’s resource constraints, stressed partnerships over gadgets as the lifeline.
“Emergency information reaches people with disabilities, especially during disasters when quick action is needed—that remains one of the most important questions,” Towai said. “With a country like Palau or a developing country, we’re not privy to a lot of these new technologies. So we still are heavily reliant on partnerships and physical caregivers to assist in conveying the threat and the risks to this particular population.”
A breakthrough, he said: including the disability community into planning from day one. “Another key achievement has been involving the disability community within our planning phases, to be able to really understand their specific needs, so that way we don’t have that cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all type of approach,” Towai explained. “That’s been successful—in them understanding the limitations of what we have, and understanding the need to do, or the what to do. And for them to contextualize that into their particular demographics. So that’s been the approach thus far.”
The strategy shone in 2016’s brutal drought, when NEMO targeted foreign communities from Bangladesh, Japan, the Philippines and beyond—many non-English speakers and non-Palauans.
“This was made apparent in 2016 during the severe drought,” Towai recalled. “We understood that there were particular members of the community that, one, were not English-speaking, and two, were non-Palauans. So we really partnered up with the Palau Visitors Authority, as well as the Chamber of Commerce, to help us reach those particular demographics.”
Informal networks sealed the deal. “We also know that there are informal community organizations like the Filipino, the Bangladeshi, and their informal leadership has kind of approached us in saying how to best reach them,” he said. “So there are messages that go into different languages as well as to the diplomatic missions here in country to ensure that we do get the timely warning out there.”