How can people be best supported during humanitarian crises with limited aid budgets and what can be done to help those same people break out of the cycle of dependency caused by multiple crises and move towards more sustainable development?
These are the questions that UN agencies on the ground in Madagascar are considering as the island nation struggles against climate change, huge humanitarian needs and persistent underdevelopment.
UNICEF’s Deputy Representative, Head of Programmes Gilles Chevalier and Natasha van Rijn, Resident Representative for the UN Development Programme discuss how changes in the way they are working are helping to reinforce resilience and sustainable development.
Gilles Chevalier: One of the major decisions we have made at the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) is to reinforce our staff footprint in the south of Madagascar which has been affected by drought due to climate change and the El Niño effect. The people in this part of the country are very vulnerable; many suffer from malnutrition and a lack of access to basic services, so there are many humanitarian needs.
There are a number of UN humanitarian agencies which are converging to contribute to the relief effort in the Grand Sud region. Systematically, those actors are also looking at ways to prevent and mitigate the devastating impacts of climate change.
Natasha van Rijn: The development indicators in the south, for example, for health, education, nutrition, infrastructure, energy supply, are all weaker than they are in other parts of the island, and that is as central to the planning and the conversations that need to take place as it is to the humanitarian response that is currently ongoing.
The UN is engaged in both humanitarian and development work. One way to define the difference is to consider humanitarian work as addressing the symptoms of an illness in an emergency situation while development works towards health and well-being by addressing the underlying structural issues which may eventually lead to a humanitarian crisis.
