Malawi: Final National Resilience Plan document set for release in March
This has been disclosed by officials from the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA).
NRP is a five year agenda aimed at addressing the causes of climate change, on one hand, and minimizing the effects of climate change on food insecurity, on the other.
The broad objective of the Plan is to help make Malawi resilient to disasters and break the cycle of food insecurity and this will be achieved through promotion of irrigation for food security, nutrition and export drive; catchment protection and management and reducing effects of floods and occurrence of drought among others.
The NRP draft was released last year and since then the document has been scrutinized by various stakeholders and there are only a few things are remaining for the final draft to be released.
Commissioner for Disaster Management Affairs Ben Botolo told Capital FM that what is remaining is to identify the activities and whether they are funded or not.
“We just discussed with partners on Thursday last week, so the final document will be out maybe sometime towards the end of this quarter, somewhere in March.”
The formulation of the NRP follows repeated incidences of disasters and food insecurity the country has been recently facing and Botolo believes the plan will help the country become a disaster resilient nation once operational.
The draft document points out that strategies that will be used are linked to and built on various policy frameworks existing in the respective sectors of the components.
Such policy frameworks include the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy II (MGDS II); National Disaster Risk Management Policy; National Agriculture Policy; Agriculture Sector Wide Approach; Malawi National Social Support Programme; Post Disaster Needs Assessment Report; and the National Water Policy.
Globally, the NRP is linked to UN’s sustainable development goals 2 and 13 that speak of zero hunger and climate action respectively.
Malawi has been experiencing food crises since the early 2000s.
This trend has largely contributed to poor crop production caused by extreme effects of climate change.