Norway: NAC launches a new disaster risk reduction project
The Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) has more than 30 years experience in Afghanistan and works in several sectors, among them Disaster Risk Reduction.
Recently NAC received funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) in order to start a new project within the field of Disaster Risk Reduction. The project will be implemented during 3 years in Badakhshan province. The province is placed in the northeast of Afghanistan, and is a very mountainous and natural hazard prone area. The goal with the project is to reduce human, social, economical and environmental losses due to natural hazards in 60 at-risk villages in the four different districts, including Yaftal, Yawan, Raghistan and Arghanj Khwah.
In order to achieve this goal, the project will focus on activities within four areas:
1. Training community members and schoolchildren in how to better prepare for, mitigate, and respond to natural hazards and disasters.
2. Building capacity of local institutions, district and provincial authorities as well as national and international stakeholders in coordinated disaster risk management.
3. Strengthen the institutional capacity of the provincial government and dedicated disaster response teams to rapidly and effectively respond to disasters.
4. Increase resilience of rural livelihood systems to respond to frequent summer drought events.
The project entered is initial phased last week as a joint workshop was conducted together with the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority (ANDMA) in Kabul on the 5th of September. In mid-October the project will be launched in Badakhshan itself.