Civil Society Network on Climate Change (CISONECC) National Coordinator Julius Ng’oma has described the country’s capacity to cope from huge impacts of natural disasters and calamities as very minimal.
Among others, he cited poverty and poor economies leading to most communities unable to bounce back on their own and reliance on well-wishers in government to come to their rescue which has not been forthcoming as some of the reasons of the country’s failure to recover from impacts of climate change.
He observed that Malawi is still having programmes for Cyclone Idai which hit the country in 2019 together with other recovery programmes for Cyclone Gombe, Ana and most recently Freddy.
“All these are still processes that are still on-going, but the chances are that we’ll still take a lot of time as a country to recover from such kind of impacts because our capacities to cope are very minimal.
“We don’t have much of the financial resources to assist the communities, but also perhaps other governments that are supposed to do something about climate change are not doing enough for them to actually support a country like Malawi to recover from such kind of climate-related impacts.
“So we’ve been lamenting the fact that the Global North is not even providing enough resources to actually support communities like in Malawi to recover and even to manage any other climate related impacts.”
He acknowledged that adaptation or any climate related programmes related to recovery were supposed to be aligned to the protocols, agreements signed over the years and also to tap resources from funding arrangements under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
However according to Ng’oma, this has not been possible due to the financial procedures which have made it very difficult for Malawi to access the resources further arguing that despite putting up proposals, it’s very minimal.
“For any programmes that maybe you’ve actually worked so hard for you to actually present as a proposal, but they don’t come on a silver platter like that just to support any recovery programme even though the world is actually seeing that country A or Malawi has been hit by a Cyclone. We still need to beg for those resources which is not supposed to be the case.”
