Would a policy on disaster preparedness help?

Malawi had no legal and institutional framework for disaster management before the 1991 Phalombe flash floods which killed scores of people, farm animals and damaged property and crops.

Following the disaster, government focused its energies on preparedness and response to natural disasters.

However, since 2005, the focus has been shifted to include disaster risk management with more attention to restoring the confidence of communities that lose assets, jobs, loved ones and leadership.

The tragedy of this approach is that the Department of Disaster Management, in principle, have embraced the need to reduce risks for disaster, but it still waits for floods, earthquakes and rainstorm to strike before it acts.

Specifically, in the absence of a policy on disaster risk reduction (DRR), as it is the case, funding activities aimed at reducing the impact become a fool’s dream.

Malawi is a signatory to the Hyogo Framework for Action, which means that it has committed to substantially reducing disaster losses of social, economic and environmental assets of communities and countries by 2015.

In fact, the Malawi Growth Development Strategy (MGDS) recognises the need to reduce risk, especially to vulnerable populations, by focusing on social protection and disaster risk management.

In support of this shift to DRR, Catholic Development Commission (Cadecom) is supporting the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) to elaborate a national DRR strategy and integrate it in government policies and programmes.

The DRR programme emphasises the importance of preparedness and mitigation planning and includes a focus on climate risk management, given the likely impacts of climate change on the Malawi population.

To improve emergency management and response systems and their coordination mechanisms, the DRR programme provides direct support on activities as well as capacity building for national and district level authorities.

But this cannot be achieved without a policy in place.

Principal secretary in the Department of Disaster Management and Preparedness Geoffrey Kanyinji says the country will soon have a disaster policy that would incorporate DRR.

“We are finalising our disaster policy,” he says.

He adds there is no need to raise alarm, saying: “We have the contingency plans that we follow and implement in all disaster areas together with stakeholders.”

Despite this optimism, the fact remains that without a policy on disaster risk reduction, Malawi will continue to dance to the whims of reactive policies.

In the absence of the DRR, budgetary allocation to the responsible department comes under the umbrella of disaster management, and so far action in this regard has proven to be reactive than proactive.

This is an area that calls for strong lobbying by different other stakeholders.