The Unforeseen Expenditure vote through which funding for disasters and natural calamities in the country is derived from, has not been adequate to cater for the climate induced disasters Malawi has been experiencing resulting in reallocation of budgetary resources from productive budget lines.
The initial budget was K2 billion which many actors viewed as being too low, sentiments which were echoed during this year’s Budget session in February and Members of Parliament advocated for increased funding towards the vote.
Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) Director responsible for disaster recovery and resilience, Peter Chimangeni acknowledged that for the past ten years, the vote has been less than K4 billion a year against Tropical Cyclone Freddy which required over K130 billion for response.
He called for proper strategies to reduce the impacts of disasters one of which is the financing mechanism noting that for a long time, disasters have been viewed as unforeseen and unpredictable but now the signs are very clear.
Chimangeni stated that the Disaster Risk Financing Strategy looked into issues of preparedness, response and the actual recovery which all require a lot of resources against what government is committing through the Unforeseen Vote.
“So that entails that we do not have enough from the government commitments but we are also trying to look at other avenues of how best we can be financing the disasters.
“We’ve seen so many partners coming in; we’ve seen the financing through the loans that are normally pre-approved and once the state of disaster is declared, we’ve seen the support from the World Bank, we’ve also seen some of the projects that are coming in what we call the crisis modifier these are resources that are made soon after an impact, they are already programmed in the projects”
The Director nonetheless indicated that despite partners coming in; these are not enough stressing on the need to do more citing the Loss and Damage Fund adding that the Department wants to explore how the DRFS can be linked to tap from these resources.
Locally, they are plans to establish the Disaster Risk Management Trust Fund which he hoped with proper implementation, Malawi should be able to get enough resources to finance disaster risk management interventions.
He underscored the need to move away from being reactive to proactive through the strategy to put resources in anticipation of climate induced disasters.
