NATIONAL PROGRAMME ON DISASTER PREVENTION PREPAREDNESS AND MITIGATION

The National Programme on Disaster Prevention, Preparedness and Mitigation aims at building national and regional capacities to alleviate the effects of natural disasters. Its main objectives are to:

reduce dependence on free food by 50-75% through an effective disaster information management system and improved institutional preparedness;

introduce development-oriented relief safety nets through employment generation schemes;

alleviate poverty by sustaining minimal livelihood security through selected area-based development interventions; and

develop settlement plans to facilitate adjusting population and livestock numbers to carrying capacity.

The programme has five sub-programmes, namely Institutional Strengthening, Advocacy Support for Macro Policy, Area-based Integrated Development, and Migration and Food Assistance.

Capacity Building Targets

UNDP is currently supporting some eight capacity building targets under the national programme. These include strengthening the decentralisation of the early warning system, creating an institutional capacity for disaster response and management, facilitating pilot interventions in disaster-prone drought and/or war affected areas aimed at poverty reduction; enhancing people's participation in development planning; strengthening indigenous traditional and non governmental organisations to enable them to carry out priority projects so as to contribute to poverty reduction; strengthening the capacity at the woreda level to integrate community-identified priorities into regional plans; enhancing the policy environment for NGO cooperation; strengthening Government capacity to manage the UNDP; and support to programme management at central and decentralised levels.

The bulk of the resources earmarked by UNDP for support to the programme are aimed at poverty reduction through area-based integrated development programmes in vulnerable areas.

Bottom-up planning has been facilitated so as to develop community identified programmes which address the vulnerabilities of the population, particularly women.

Poverty Alleviation in Vulnerable Areas

The programme addresses the root causes of poverty in 15 vulnerable administrative districts in the following five pilot regions:

Amhara Region (North Wello zone); Tigray Region; Southern Nations Nationalities Peoples Regional State, (North Omo zone); Somali National Regional State; and Gambella Region.

Some US$ 11.6 million has been allocated by UNDP for this purpose under the Area-based Integrated Development sub-programme.

The programme is executed by the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission. Through its support UNDP will help demonstrate how Government policy on promotion of participatory planning can be made operational by assisting the Ethiopian Government to integrate community identified problems into the formal planning process; strengthening community capacity for planning implementing, monitoring and evaluating their priority programmes, and strengthening government capacity to monitor and manage community-identified programmes

Areas currently being supported under the Area-based development programmes are:

increasing community participation and institutional capacity building;

increasing food production;

improving natural resource conservation;

promoting alternative economic activities and

entrepreneurship;

improving health service coverage and health status;

increasing access to education and literacy; and

enhancing community accessibility to social services.