World Disaster Report 2018 launched

The World Disaster Report, 2018, was launched in town by the International Federation of the Red Cross (known as Red Crescent in Pakistan) at the Institute of Business Administration, City Campus, on Thursday.

The event was meant to coincide with the hundred years of the founding of the International Red Cross. The theme of the report is, “Leaving no one behind”.

Shahnaz Hamid, chairperson, Sindh, Pakistan Red Crescent, highlighted the challenges faced by the humanitarian sector in Pakistan. She said that the United Nations, in the Drought Response 2019, had identified the monetary response as $96.3 million to reach a population of 2.06 million but that is only 40 percent of the affected population of Balochistan and Sindh. We have a burgeoning population and an economy faced with struggles and we are frequently faced with disasters, natural, man-made, and emergencies. These result in displacement, loss of lives, crops, and livestock affecting both the economy and the populace.

“The world has to do so much more to bring the marginalised within the ambit of the Red Cross.” Women and children, she said, were most affected.

This was followed by a video on Tharparkar, with its forbidding landscape and a population enveloped in poverty, and how the solar operated water pumps installed by the Red Crescent had improved the people’s lives as the women who had to walk for miles and miles to fetch water for the household now had the facility of modern methods of water supply in their vicinity.

This was followed by a talk by Dr Saeed Elahi, chairman, Pakistan Red Crescent Society, who in his talk, “Why WDR (World Disaster Report) is relevant to Pakistan”, who, while lauding the services of agencies like the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA), outlined the hindrances that hamper development and relief efforts. Some of the factors he cited were: finances; lack of access roads; lack of language skills.

However, the report suggests ways and means to reach the most marginalised. Local workers, he said, had to be mobilised as they knew the local conditions much better and commanded the confidence of the local population.

In his talk titled, “Why WDR matters”, Neil Buhne, from the Red Cross mission in Pakistan, said that globalisation and the rapid climate change had changed things and confronted Red Cross/Crescent workers with new challenges. For one, he said that there were too many people “out of sight”. There has to be unhindered access to workers to reach the people “out of sight”.

He said that what was called was a holistic approach. He underlined the principles of compassion to help the deserving. Dr Shireen Mustafa from the Planning and Development Department, Government of Sindh, had a rather optimistic picture to present. She said that the main problems of the marginalised were malnutrition, stunting and lack of education. She said that on all three fronts there had been improvements.

She said that there had been no cholera outbreak as a result of the floods. Access to the target groups, she said, had improved.

Noted economist Dr Kaiser Bangali gave a rather pessimistic assessment as regards the province of Balocchistan. “Balochistan has not been left behind, it has been left out,” he said. He said that there was no road network and the road from Gwadar to Quetta was a three-hour tortuous journey. He said that there was a dire need for emergency centres but there was only one in Quetta.

He said that there were lots of resources but no road connectivity. He said there were no flat bottomed boats meant exclusively to operate in flooded areas. This was followed by a panel discussion, titled, ‘Exploring the relevance of WDR in Pakistan: How can we scale up efforts to ‘leave no one behind?’

The discussion was moderated by Dr Bengali. The panel comprised Neil Buhne; Dr Marilyn Borromeo, country director, Pakistan; Dr A Bari Khan, CEO, Indus Hospital; Babar Jadoon, Deputy Director, Health, PRCS, NHQ; and Col Tariq of the NDMA.

Dr Jadoon said that over the last decade, the mortality rate had dropped. He said that we had to operate at the grassroots level to elicit viable results.