As Pakistan’s southern Sindh province struggles to cope with some of the worst
flooding in its history, IOM and its partners in the “cluster” of aid
agencies providing emergency shelter have appealed to international
donors for US$67 million to help at least 274,000 vulnerable families.
The appeal, which follows Pakistan’s urgent request for
international assistance 10 days ago, is part of a broader consolidated
UN appeal for US$357 for the next three months covering coordination,
food security, health, logistics, shelter and non-food relief items,
and water, sanitation and hygiene.
The Shelter Cluster, which is led by IOM, is appealing for funding
for 26 projects submitted by six UN agencies, eight international NGOs
and 11 local NGOs. The projects were selected from nearly 100
applications by the Cluster, in agreement with the UN and the
government.
“These projects represent the minimum of international support that
Pakistan needs to provide Sindh’s most desperate, flood-displaced
families with the emergency shelter and other essential non-food relief
items that they need to survive,” says IOM Emergency Advisor for Asia
Brian Kelly.
“Nobody should underestimate the consequences for thousands of
vulnerable communities, already weakened by last year’s floods, if the
international community fails to respond adequately to this appeal,” he
added.
The Shelter Cluster response, if funded, will complement the
Pakistani government’s commitment to provide 150,000 tents for families
displaced by the floods.
It will include tents, plastic sheets, ropes, tent poles, sleeping
mats, blankets, kitchen utensils and other life-saving survival items
for at least 274,000 impoverished, displaced farming families, many of
whom have lost all of what little they had to the flood waters.
Shelter experts recommend a mix of tents and plastic sheet-based
shelter kits in emergencies. While tents can be better in camps in the
short term, plastic sheet is cheaper, more versatile and can be more
useful in the longer term, when displaced families return home and use
it for waterproofing new shelters and rebuilt homes.
According to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority
(NDMA), some six million people in all 23 Sindh districts have now been
affected by the floods. Some 1.39 houses have been damaged or
destroyed, together with an estimated 2 million acres of crops, and at
least 248 people have died.
An estimated 482,899 people are now living in some 2,737 makeshift
temporary relief sites, including schools and public buildings, dotted
across the province. Thousands of spontaneous sites where people are
camped out on higher ground or on roadsides are yet to be counted. By
some estimates the total could be close to 6,000. SANA
