Another year gone without disaster policy

There was hope that, by the end of 2013, Malawi will have a Disaster Risk Management (DRM) policy. It has not happened. Is Malawi really committed to the Hyogo Framework it signed in 2005?

Floods occurring in the middle of the wilderness are just a natural hazard.

But if they occur where humans live, for instance, the highly populated Tengani in Nsanje, they have the potential to turn into a disaster because they threaten the lives and properties. That is why there is nothing ‘natural’ about a disaster.

Nature provides the hazards—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and so on—but humans, through deforestation and building in flood-prone areas, help to turn floods into disaster.

To mean, though we cannot stop floods from occurring, we can, at least, prevent them from becoming a disaster. Preventing hazards from becoming disasters has, today, become the leading philosophy guiding disaster management across the globe.

In fact, it is a philosophy that took off in 2005 when 168 nations across the globe, Malawi inclusive, met in Japan and endorsed the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005-2015 in Japan.

Fundamental to the HFA is an advocacy towards change in focus when managing disasters. Before it came into the picture, disaster management, especially in developing nations like Malawi, meant responding to disasters with relief items when they strike. There was hardly a consideration of dealing with the risks that hazards posed on humans.

HFA, then, is advancing a change in focus from disaster response to risk management.

Parties to the HFA, as a result, agreed to achieve by 2015 ‘the substantial reduction of disaster losses, in lives and in the social, economic and environmental assets of communities and countries’.

To achieve that, just like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), signatories came up with five priority areas, each with different set-goals to be met by 2015.

The first priority, for instance, is for nations to ensure that, by 2015, disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation.

The wisdom underlying the priority is that countries that develop policy, legislative and institutional frameworks for disaster risk reduction and that are able to develop and track progresses through specific and measurable indicators have greater capacity to manage risks and to achieve widespread consensus for, engagement in and compliance with disaster risk reduction measures across all sectors of society.

For countries like Malawi, according to James Kalikwembe, disaster risk management (DRM) programme officer for the Evangelical Association of Malawi (EAM), HFA first priority is critical for Malawi.

“As I am talking, we do not have a law or a policy that direct disaster risk management in Malawi,” he says.

Driven by HFA, Malawi, through the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma), started the process of coming up with the DRM policy. By January 2013, the draft policy document had gone through all the processes.

In an interview with The Nation in September 2013, Dodma’s director of disaster risk reduction James Chiusiwa said the policy is no longer in the hands of their office.

“We did our part and we submitted it to the Policy Unit Department in the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC),” he said.

Actually, the Policy Unit Department in the OPC is responsible for taking the policy to a committee of Parliament to scrutinise.

An official in the unit confided in The Nation last year, saying: “We are finding it difficult to get all the MPs at the same time to scrutinise the policy before it is taken to the Cabinet for discussion and approval”.

To mean, currently, the draft DRM policy is yet to grace the Cabinet for discussion and approval. The fear with 2014, some have argued, politicians will drown their heads in the imminent tripartite elections.

They will not have time for other pertinent. How far true that is, is debatable.

But according to Kalikwembe, the delay in finalising the policy is having tremendous effects in implementing DRM projects.

“There are a number of organisations implementing DRM projects and, most of them, are doing fine. However, the challenge is that, without a policy, we do not have a reference document to guide uniformity of our actions,” he said.

He added that getting funding for the project from the donors becomes problematic because most donors demand to see our DRM policy.

National secretary of the Catholic Development Commission (Cadecom) Casterns Mulume also concurs with Kalikwembe.

“As of now, our DRM activities are works without direction; we have no legal framework to guide DRM activities in Malawi.

‘We seem not to prioritise DRM issues as a nation, yet for the past five consecutive years, Malawi has been experiencing various forms of disasters.

“Every time a disaster strikes, we have been reactive not proactive in our responses; for how long shall we operate this way?” he said.

Mulume—whose organisation works in the areas of DRM, food security, water, sanitation and hygiene, relief and humanitarian assistance—added that the policy is taking ‘unnecessarily too long’ as such he called on ‘government to fast-track the finalisation of DRM and other related policies such as the Climate Change Policy and Agriculture Policy’.

However, with the fever of this year’s elections in May, there are fears that the policy might again be left in the gallows.

Otherwise, with 2015 drawing close, it remains to be seen if Malawi will meet the Hyogo deadline.