Shortage of funds leaves hundreds of thousands of families weathering the winter without emergency shelter
LONDON (AlertNet) - Six months after Pakistan's devastating floods began, hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors are weathering the winter without any kind of emergency shelter, largely due to a shortage of funds for the humanitarian response, international aid agencies say.
Donors have contributed just over 56 percent of the $1.96 billion requested by the Pakistani government, the United Nations and other aid groups for their relief and early recovery operations, due to continue until October. Breaking that down, only 39 percent of the $322 million needed for emergency and interim shelter has been provided.
Emergency shelter in the form of a tent or two plastic tarpaulins has been distributed to some 864,400 households, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). But that means roughly half the 1.75 million families whose homes were destroyed or damaged by the floods have yet to receive assistance to put even a flimsy roof over their heads.
"Shelter remains a concern area, and we have not been able to provide it to 100 percent of people," said Brigadier Sajid Naeem, who heads up the operations unit of the government's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). "There is a huge shortage of funding from donors. All the facilities that were destroyed have to be rebuilt on a permanent basis ... but we still need money for transitional and temporary shelters."
The monsoon floods - which happened over several weeks starting late last July, moving from the north to the south of the country mainly along the Indus River - inundated more than one-fifth of Pakistan's territory, killed nearly 2,000 people, and affected some 18 million to 20 million, of whom 14 million required immediate humanitarian aid.
International aid agencies are preparing to help communities erect nearly 162,000 shelters by July, some of which will consist of durable one-room houses, made of locally available and salvaged materials, which can be extended later. Others will be made of beams and plastic sheeting.
But IOM says that, without more funding, at least half a million families who lost their homes and need help to rebuild either a one-room or transitional shelter will receive nothing.
"We plan to provide support to at least 600 families to construct one-room shelters and model villages in the worst affected areas of Rajanpur district. But we need funding from agencies or individual donors to do it," Narjis Batool, coordinator of the Sangtani Women Rural Development Organisation, said in a statement.
Overall, around 95 percent of the 10 million people who were displaced by the flooding at its worst point have gone back to their villages, according to the government.
But aid workers say the humanitarian situation remains particularly difficult in the south, in Sindh and eastern Balochistan, where around 150,000 people are still living in camps because the flood waters have yet to evaporate. On top of that, some 200,000 people are living more or less out in the open near their uninhabitable homes, according to Manuel Bessler, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Pakistan.
"They are living in makeshift camps and we are trying to support them by building latrines and getting food to them," he told AlertNet. "This is quite concerning for us because they are scattered and difficult to assist."
Bessler said conditions in Sindh still require "a full-blown emergency operation". "The impression that everything is over - this we have to counter," he added.
HEALTH FEARS
The humanitarian official said low levels of funding for health activities are another challenge, with only around 40 percent of needs covered. The fear is that when the weather starts to become warmer from around March, standing water in Sindh especially could become a breeding ground for waterborne diseases like cholera, as well as the mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue.
The UK-based medical charity Merlin says it is expecting to see much higher infection rates of malaria this year.
"We must be prepared to respond to as many as 2.2 million cases of malaria over the next six months in all areas that are mildly or severely flood-affected," Naeem Durrani, Merlin's malaria expert in Pakistan, said in a statement. "By comparison, last year's estimated figures for all of Pakistan were 1.3 to 1.5 million cases for the whole year."
The aid group warns that in the shorter term, as the cold weather continues, many people living in tents will be vulnerable to respiratory infections and life-threatening complications like pneumonia. And it expects to see malnutrition rates rise, due to a scarcity of food.
Oxfam - which is helping some 1.9 million people across the country - said in a report this week that substantial investment is needed "to ensure that there is not a secondary food crisis", as the floods destroyed more than 2 million hectares of standing crops in the country's agricultural heartlands.
Pointing to "critical" levels of malnutrition in the south even before the floods, the international aid agency said opportunities to kickstart food production during the winter planting season have been largely missed. "The problem is even worse now, as the levels of malnutrition are compounded by an inability to grow food for the future," the report said.
The U.N. Children's Fund told Reuters this week that new figures show Sindh province is suffering levels of malnutrition almost as critical as Chad and Niger, with hundreds of thousands of children at risk. OCHA's Bessler said food security is a worry in the south amid rising food prices, because Sindh will not see its next harvest until September.
"We are still pushing the need for humanitarian assistance," he said. "I don't expect starvation, but I am concerned about the medium- to long-term impact because a lot of crops have been destroyed and fields have been damaged by flood waters."
NDMA official Naeem said the assistance provided to help farmers get back on their feet - with more than 500,000 households receiving seeds and fertiliser - has assuaged initial fears about country-wide grain shortages. In addition, families returning to their homes are being given food packages for one month, as well as 20,000 rupees ($233) in cash to tide them over and help them restart their livelihoods.
OCHA's Bessler conceded the humanitarian system has not managed to get emergency aid to all those in need, but said it has done its best to cope with a crisis on a massive geographic and human scale.
"Because of the huge expansion of the disaster, there were people left out - for reasons of capacity, resources, access, security," he said. "This is not a justifiable excuse. But we need to take it as a push to do more, to catch up in places like Sindh. It is still a race against time."
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