Malawi needs significant amount of money to recover from floods - Chilima

Source(s): Malawi News Agency

By Tikondane Vega

Blantyre - Vice President Saulosi Chilima has said Malawi needs a significant amount of money to recover from the January floods that badly bruised the country's economy.

Chilima made the remarks in Blantyre, Monday morning during the opening of a three day World Vision Malawi Lessons Learnt workshop. It is aimed at reflecting on how various stakeholders responded to the floods that affected 15 districts.

Chilima said the Post Disaster Needs Assessment preliminary results have revealed that the floods caused substantial damage and losses in the productive, public infrastructure and social service sectors, including private and community assets.

“This is an indication that the impact of the floods badly bruised our economy and that government of Malawi cannot manage to deal with this alone without the support from our development partners to recover from the flood disaster as well as reconstruct the damaged infrastructure and people's livelihoods.

“It is a fact that we cannot stop natural disasters but if we can arm ourselves with knowledge, many lives wouldn't have been lost if there was enough disaster preparedness.

“This learning event is, therefore, very important as it will enable stakeholders who were involved in the floods response to share successes, challenges, lessons learnt and recommendations which will be useful for the implementation of future response operations,” said Chilima.

Chilima said Government was thankful to both the local and international community for providing assistance towards the flood response operations and in particular, United Nations through the United Nations Resident Coordinator for the assistance provided to government, through the Department of Disaster Management Affairs.

Deputy National Director for World Vision Malawi Fordson Kafweku commended Lilongwe through President Peter Mutharika for the support rendered to World Vision such as duty waivers and provision of vehicles and warehousing.

“As a Christian Organization, World Vision will be reflecting on a number of questions during this meeting and that include is there anything we could have done better than we did not do?

“We shall also look our meeting biblically, like the bible says we are watchmen, did we do our job right as watchmen? We shall also look at transparency, is there anything we can learn from the Christian perspectives as a country?” said Kafweku.

Meanwhile, Director of Disaster Risk Reduction in the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, James Chiusiwa has said government will next week conduct a floods response review meeting with stakeholders.

Chiusiwa said World Vision's learning event is, therefore important as it will enable stakeholders involved in the flood response to share successes, challenges, lessons learnt and recommendations which will be useful for the implementation of future response operations.

Explore further

Hazards Flood
Country and region Malawi
Share this

Please note: Content is displayed as last posted by a PreventionWeb community member or editor. The views expressed therein are not necessarily those of UNDRR, PreventionWeb, or its sponsors. See our terms of use

Is this page useful?

Yes No Report an issue on this page

Thank you. If you have 2 minutes, we would benefit from additional feedback (link opens in a new window).