The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) received a US$3.75 million (approximately PhP 160 million) grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which will be used to expand WFP’s disaster preparedness and response programme in the Philippines.
Working in close partnership with the central government and the Office of Civil Defense, WFP and local government units in four disaster-prone provinces of Sorsogon, Benguet, Cagayan and Laguna have been rolling out a disaster preparedness and response pilot programme focused on building local emergency management capacity, disaster mitigation and protection of livelihoods.
“The Philippines was among the world’s most disaster-affected countries in 2011 and WFP is doing its utmost to build resilience among vulnerable communities to allow them to better cope with natural disasters,” said WFP Philippines Representative and Country Director Stephen Anderson. “WFP is grateful to the U.S. government for its support, which builds on the successful results achieved by national and local governments over the past year.”
The new funding from USAID will enable WFP to expand its disaster preparedness activities to parts of the Visayas (Iloilo) and Mindanao (Cagayan de Oro, Butuan and Davao), and to engage local non-government organizations and universities in efforts to build resilience to natural disasters, increasingly exacerbated by climate change.
The key components of this expanded initiative will include community-driven disaster mitigation and preparedness projects such as flood control and landslide mitigation activities, training for disaster management personnel tailored to local needs such as contingency planning, and the promotion of innovative and cost-effective disaster mitigation and climate change adaptation projects such as early warning techniques.
This latest contribution from USAID brings the cumulative total of U.S. funding support for WFP’s disaster preparedness and response programme in the Philippines to US$4.5 million. As with the pilot phase, complementary matching resources from the national government and local government will be sought to reinforce the programme’s sustainability.
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