| Overview : The United Nations Resident Coordinator’s Office and UNDP are supporting the Government of Malawi through the Department of Disaster Management in its efforts to ensure coherence and coordination between resilience and intra- and inter- cluster humanitarian activities and development partners at the country level. Following the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals; Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Humanitarian summit and Malawi Growth and Development Strategy III, Malawi has embarked on the development agenda that is linking all these instruments towards resilience. A common denominator in these instruments and other multilateral agreements which Malawi has ratified, is a commitment towards risk informed development. Malawi continues to experience increasing cases of shocks and disasters, with the most frequent being extremes of drought and floods. The key drivers to frequent disasters include environmental degradation and climate change coupled with multi-dimensional poverty and other social-economic factors that affect the adaptive capacity of the vulnerable population to cope with a changing climate. Currently, 15 out of a total of 28 districts is considered as disaster prone, and urban vulnerabilities and new hazards continue to increase the vulnerability of the population. One of the areas where the DRM and humanitarian sector requires urgent attention is management of information for planning, analyzing trends and losses of lives and property, as well as reporting to global multilateral agreements which Malawi has ratified. Malawi has been maintaining a profile of shock incidents since 1945, however, gaps are still present in the profile to generate important analyses for planning and real-time incident reporting. The absence of a fully functional and effective system of generating, packaging and analysing information and data on DRM, resilience and humanitarian work, it is difficult to advance risk-informed planning to meet the development needs of the country and contribute to household resilience. Absence of credible system of generating timely data affects timely response to affected populations, which is one of the global indicators for humanitarian response. Implementation of a credible disaster risk information management system would strengthen coordination between sectors, increase the speed, accuracy, and reliability of data toward improving disaster risk reduction in the country. Often, however, data is hard to access or doesn’t exist. Therefore, there is a need for the development of the tools and adoption of methodologies to collect and store data for effective decision- making in all phases of disaster risk management.
Technological innovation and the role of partnerships across sectors have become increasingly important to accelerate progress in addressing the problems that humanity face. Against this background, and with support from the DFID-sponsored Building Resilience and Adapting to Climate Change (BRACC) partnership in four priority districts under the Government of Malawi’s National Resilience Strategy (NRS), UNDP is engaging the services of a Component Lead for DRM Information Systems. |
