Six months after the century’s worst floods hit Pakistan, the water had receded, but the emergency is far from over. Millions of people are still shelterless and are in need of humanitarian aid as the government in Islamabad is battling for its very own survival, and the country’s economy is on the brink of collapse. Expectedly, external aid for the flood victims remains elusive.
The USD 1.9 billion appeal, launched in September to assist 14 million people between September 2010 and September 2011, was only funded to 56.3 per cent (USD 1.1 billion received).
Says Elisabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ‘Funding remained a pressing issue’. Nearly four million people are living without temporary or permanent shelter.
Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that agencies in the shelter cluster had appealed for USD 322 million but had only received USD 126 million or 39 per cent of the funds requested. With this money the shelter cluster had distributed over 1.62 million blankets as well as emergency shelter in the form of a tent or two plastic tarpaulins to some 864,400 households, among other things.
The point is the needs remain great. Unless adequate funds are available and reconstruction work is initiated, the future of about 500,000 families across Pakistan will remain bleak as they cannot restart their lives afresh, the IOM official told a teleconference recently.
According to Pascal Villeneuve, UNICEF’s representative in Pakistan, the floods left one fifth of the total land area of Pakistan or an area the size of the United Kingdom under water. The lives of almost 20 million people had been affected, which was more than the combined total of the people affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti and Cyclone Nargis. An estimated 2.2 million hectares of crops had been destroyed and half a million livestock had been lost.
Realizing the magnitude and scale of the disaster, UNICEF, along with other humanitarian partners, had mounted one of the largest emergency responses to reach the affected population, especially women and children. Six months into the floods, they continue to respond to the urgent needs of the flood-affected people, most of whom have returned to their areas of origin only to find their houses and communities in total devastation.
UNICEF believes that the humanitarian emergency in Pakistan is far from over and that a lot more needs to done. On its part, the UN agency along with its associates has scaled up its operations to the most affected and vulnerable with life-saving relief supplies and recovery services. Its report card is impressive. Clean water to an unprecedented 3.5 million people on a daily basis, Sanitation facilities for more than 1.9 million people living in camps and communities, immunisation of over 9 million children against measles and polio, Vitamin A supplements to 8.5 million children and nutrition feeding programme for around 120,000 malnourished women and children. Temporary learning centres are benefiting around 180,000 children, many of whom have been enrolled for the first time.
UN agencies are working against great odds, and in an atmosphere which is just waiting for the trigger to explode. In a country where rural infrastructure is virtually non-existent, whatever little road network that has been there has been badly damaged or destroyed making the relief tasks all the more difficult. The slow pace of donations, resource constraints and the lack of reliable data are additional challenges to overcome.
Going by UNICEF data, it is fair to surmise that Pakistan is today a malnutrition volcano. In the relatively less backward Sindh province itself, malnutrition rate is acute. It is 23.1 per cent in Northern Sindh and 21.2 per cent in Southern Sindh. That meant that around one in five children aged 6-59 months is malnourished. This rate was well above the WHO’s 15 per cent emergency threshold level for triggering a humanitarian response. The Sindh Government estimated that about 120,000 children aged 6-59 months are severely malnourished.
To date, UNICEF has received USD 198 million in donations and pledges out of the USD 251 million required. It works out to a funding gap of 21 per cent or USD 52 million.
Pakistan is in a sense a money order economy. Remittances from migrant workers mostly from the Gulf and the US are substantial but studies show that the money is rarely used for income generating activities.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) conducted a survey covering 500 households from June through August 2009 in high-migration districts in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It showed that young Pakistani expatriates were able to gather USD 17,000 on average during their stay in Saudi Arabia. Most of this money was sent back to families in Pakistan, who used it rarely for income-generating activities and small businesses. Mostly non-banking channels (hundi route for instance) transmit the remittances, which is yet another reflection on the state of affairs in Pakistan.
