ECHO Contributes Additional EUR 5 Million to Homeless Pakistan Flood Victims
The European Commission Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO) has
contributed EUR 5 million to IOM to provide emergency shelter and
one-room shelters for victims of Pakistan's 2010 floods. The
funding follows an earlier ECHO shelter contribution of EUR 4
million.
The floods in the summer of 2010 left over 1.6 million Pakistani
homes destroyed or damaged. Aid agencies have managed to provide
emergency shelter in the form of tents and plastic sheets to some
783,000 families, but over half a million mostly desperately poor
families have yet to receive any aid.
In Sindh, the worst hit province, the government and aid
agencies have only managed to reach about 32 per cent of the people
in need, while in Punjab they have reached about 63 per cent,
according to the IOM-led Emergency Shelter Cluster.
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The new ECHO funding will provide at least 15,000 homeless
families with tents or plastic sheets and essential non-food relief
items in Sindh and Punjab provinces. It will also help at least
7,000 families to build new one-room shelters from local building
materials in line with the government endorsed shelter cluster
strategy.
The money will also contribute to IOM's coordination of the work
of the over 70 international and local agencies participating in
the shelter cluster, their local and national government
counterparts and the National and Provincial Disaster Management
Authorities (NDMA /
PDMA).
The funding for one-room shelters follows a successful IOM pilot
project launched in Sindh and Punjab in September 2010. Its
objective was to help 500 families able to return to their places
of origin to build a locally designed house from local materials
that would last for three to five years and could be expanded.
Different families had different needs, based on the amount of
damage caused by the floods in different locations. So IOM provided
money and technical help on a case-by-case basis, monitored by
mobile IOM technical teams in the field. Families had to construct
the houses themselves with help from neighbours, which mobilized
communities' capacity for self-help.
A total of nearly 1,500 one-room shelters and nearly 5,000
transitional shelters have now been completed by various shelter
cluster organizations in flood affected areas. The US Agency for
International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance
(OFDA) has also allocated USD 10 million to IOM to enable it to
support the construction of at least 16,000 more one-room
shelters.
For more information on IOM's activities in Pakistan, to
download IOM funding appeals or to donate to IOM's flood response,
please go to:
"/jahia/Jahia/pakistan/lang/en" target="" title=
"">http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pakistan.
For information on the Emergency Shelter Cluster, please go to:
"https://sites.google.com/site/shelterpak2010/" target="_blank"
title="">https://sites.google.com/site/shelterpak2010/.
For additional information please contact:
Saleem Rehmat
IOM Islamabad
Tel: +92.3008560341
E-mail:
"mailto:srehmat@iom.int">srehmat@iom.int