Crisis management? Do people in developing countries benifit from the concept?

I was working as a secondary level teacher , when a child aged 11 committed suicide in Om Secondary School, in Nepal. Winter holidays had started and the boy was all alone and depressed as his parents had not come to take him home even after he spent a whole week in school.

The incident put the school in big crisis, there were questions on security in the school, some blamed the school of beating the boy to death, some created a story that as the boy saw some illicit relationship going on between a teacher and a student , the boy was killed.All these rumours were capitalized by local and national media, and everybody was talking about the incident.The hard earned reputation of the school in the time frame of 16 years had all been shattered into pieces.

How the school dealt with the situation? Did it send a press release to media, like they do in these countries at the beginning of a crisis? NO, they did not. Did they apologize with the sufferers, i.e the child's parents and relatives? No, instead, they were furious at the parents for not taking the child home on time, which depressed him and eventually leading him to a decision of committing suicide.This worsen the situation, the parents filed a case against the school telling that their son was murdered. The police took all blamed people into custody for interrogation. That was one of the detailed and highly interrogated case in Nepal. Samples were sent to forensic lab, all the children, teachers,and whoever were related to the case were interrogated.Finally the school got a clean chit.

Did the school , after this organized a press conference? No, not again, all those investigative process had shattered them. They had become emotionally weak and though media continued writing against them, they remained quite. And although they had not done any thing wrong this crisis cost them their hard earned reputation.

Crisis management thus is a handy tool for developed countries, but as people still do not know about it in countries like Nepal. So their reputation is at stake, when they suffer from crisis.As Nepal represents the developing country, we can assume that situation in all other developing countries would be the same.