ReliefWeb

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Over the course of the 2010 monsoon season, Pakistan experienced the worst floods in its history.

Heavy rainfall, flash floods and riverine floods combined to create a moving body of water equal in dimension to the land mass of the United Kingdom. The floods have affected 78 districts out of a total of 141 districts in Pakistan, and more than 18 million people – one-tenth of Pakistan‟s population – devastating villages from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. More than 1,700 people have lost their lives, and at least 1.7 million homes have been damaged or destroyed. As of the publication of this revision, seven weeks since heavy rainfall and flash floods claimed their first victims, flood waves continue to devastate the southern province of Sindh, where the full extent of losses and damages may not be known for several more weeks.

The Pakistan Initial Floods Emergency Response Plan (PIFERP) was launched on 11 August seeking an initial $459 million to respond to the immediate relief needs of flood-affected people. This revised Response Plan, which takes into account fresh needs assessments, fluctuating beneficiary figures, and an extended planning and budgeting horizon, seeks $1.9 billion to enable international partners (UN organizations and NGOs) to support the Government of Pakistan in addressing the residual relief needs and early recovery needs of floodaffected families for the next twelve months. A midterm revision will be carried out in the first quarter of 2011 to provide more refined data and analysis on early recovery needs.

The overarching goal of this plan is to prevent excess morbidity and mortality and to enable floodaffected communities to return to their normal lives. The consequent strategic objectives are:

1. Ensure adequate public health of the floodaffected population through an integrated approach or “survival strategy” combining Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), health, food and nutrition. Public health surveillance will identify priority areas for the restoration of basic WASH, health and nutrition facilities and services.

2. Provide food assistance and other social protection measures to offer a basic safety net, especially to the most vulnerable.

3. Support sustainable solutions through the provision of shelter assistance, prioritizing interventions that can span emergency shelter, transitional shelter and core housing needs.

4. Restore on and off-farm livelihoods, with a focus on agriculture, livestock, and protection and restoration of productive assets.

5. Restore basic community services and supporting the re-establishment of public administration, health, and education systems.

Working in support of and in close coordination with the Government of Pakistan and its National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and other stakeholders, the humanitarian community in Pakistan continues to make all efforts to reach as many of the affected as possible. It is recognized, however, that the sheer scale of the disaster and the unprecedented number of vulnerable people exceeds the capacity of any single stakeholder. The geographical scale of this disaster and the number of affected people makes this a bigger and more complex situation than almost any other ever faced by the humanitarian community. However, the system is scaling up: for example there are now 76 operational organizations in the WASH Cluster, compared to 27 at the start of the floods.

With resources stretched even more thinly than usual by the sheer magnitude of the disaster, humanitarian organizations have a clear responsibility to ensure an effective, needs-based response.
Strategies therefore draw directly on the evidence and analysis gathered through the completed needs assessments, including the initial Vulnerability Assessment, the Multi-Cluster Rapid Assessment Mechanism (MCRAM), and government baseline data on all affected districts and communities.

The impact and results of the humanitarian community's contribution will be measured against a set of agreed key performance indicators at the strategic, cluster and project levels. Monitoring and reporting against these indicators will be based on the roll-out of a recently developed “Single Reporting Format.” This tool, successfully piloted in two of the affected federating units, will allow partners to demonstrate their progress against the strategies presented in this document via a monthly online reporting format.

Humanitarian actors will seek to closely coordinate their activities with other partners, including civil and military authorities, civil society, and the private sector to ensure that assistance reaches as many affected people as possible. Humanitarian assistance will be guided by the principle of impartiality and non-discrimination, regardless of status as nationals or refugees and will focus especially on the most vulnerable. Gender equality has been integrated into this response plan in a manner fully consistent with the policy commitments and practices of the Government of Pakistan.

Different sets of strategic key performance indicators have been developed for relief and early recovery, which will allow the impact of relief projects and early recovery projects to be measured separately. Where baselines do not exist, the number of people who have been confirmed as affected will serve as a baseline for project-specific performance. Activities of clusters will be developed against key performance indicators that clearly outline the proportion of the baseline that will be targeted. A comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework has been developed to report against indicators and objectives.

Although the resources required to meet all the humanitarian needs caused by the floods could be reckoned as higher than $2 billion, the Humanitarian Country Team has confined itself to this figure for this publication to be sure that its member organizations can fully use the requested resources. As organizations continue to deploy capacity and more information about needs emerges, the sum of requested resources is likely to move accordingly. This revised plan is the product of the Humanitarian Country Team and reflects its collective estimate of the situation and best possible response, devised on the basis of close consultation with the Government of Pakistan. This plan should be considered a “living document” whose elements will continue to evolve as consultations continue, new information emerges, and additional capacity deploys.