Disaster Management

Timeframe: February 2023 to January 2026

Impact area: The project targets Nsanje, Mulanje and Phalombe districts in the Southern Region of Malawi.

Note: Actual Traditional Authorities and Group village Heads will be updated awaiting confirmation by district authorities

Project Background

The scaling up locally led adaptation and transforming humanitarian responses to climate change is a global programme which is targeting 12 countries in the world including Malawi. The programme is funded by United States Agency for International Development Agency (USAID) through the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent (IFRC).

Overall aim of this project is to support communities to reduce their climate-related risks and adapt to climate change, including in some of the least supported and most vulnerable and marginalized communities. The programme will focus on scaling up locally led, integrated and multi-sectoral approaches which can help build sustained climate resilience at the community level. It will introduce a new, holistic approach to ensure transformational change across target National Societies’ institutional set-up, programmes and operations, ensuring they become truly ‘climate-smart’ and scale up proven, evidence-based climate change adaptation efforts.

Objectives

Objective 1: Support National Societies to increase their ambition and capacity to address changing climate risks and help communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change

Objective 2: Enable the implementation of locally led action in vulnerable communities to reduce risks from the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events

Objective 3: Leverage this grant for increased access to finance for National Societies’ climate plans and

Ambitions

Anticipated Results

The objectives and proposed interventions connect and contribute to three global IFRC targets – which link to IFRC’s Charter targets and Global Climate Resilience Programme.

● Reach 250 million people with activities to address the rising climate risks.

● By 2025, climate and environmental risks are factored into all our programmes and humanitarian operations.

● 100 National Societies implement environmental, or climate campaigns focused on behavior change.

Target Districts: Phalombe and Blantyre for area specific interventions and across the country for institution and organization-based interventions

Donor: ECHO

Implementation approach: consortium of FAO, WFP as co-applicants and Danish Red Cross/Malawi Red Cross Society

Project Duration: 1st November 2023 – 30th November 2025

Project’s main focus:

This Action aims to reduce the impact of climate induced shocks on the most vulnerable populations in Malawi. This involves targeted capacity-building for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) stakeholders at all level thus national, district, and community, enabling them to implement anticipatory actions (AA), alongside existing early warning systems and impact-based forecasting information.

The Action involves pilots and evidence generation for AA, improving program design and advocacy materials. These resources support government, partners, and practitioners in institutionalising and scaling up AA through a multi-hazard approach.

The project has 3 result areas namely :

1.  Robust multi-actor and multi-sectoral frameworks for Anticipatory Action (AA)  which aims at seeing that coordination are established and AA operations are carried out in a harmonised manner, supported by learning, research and piloting to advocate for a system wide shift from reaction to anticipation in Malawi.

 2. Triggers for AA are developed, which aims at seeing that collaboration between forecasters is enhanced and capacity building for impact-based forecasting is supported while disaster risk financing (DRF) analyses is enhanced, existing financing instruments for AA are aligned and further DRF instruments expanded. 

 3.Establishment of an AA crisis modifier

The action presents an innovative approach towards operationalizing inter-agency, harmonised AA interventions by breaking the silos and focusing on operationalizing agency commitments to reduce fragmentation and achieve a broader reach through harmonised AA mechanisms.

Beneficiaries: the action will target population identified from the areas exposed to prioritised hazard for flood and extreme rain exposure, with focus on people with special needs such as those families with people with disabilities, elderly persons through multipurpose cash and Group Cash Transfers (GCTs) . The action will also target entities and institutions such as: Local and national authorities in DRM, and line ministries on capacity building activities.