By Leilani S. Junio
MANILA, June 29 (PNA) — Twenty months after typhoon “Yolanda” devastated a large area of the Visayas in November 2013, the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) said on Monday that together with its partners, they are continuing to provide recovery assistance to the affected communities and individuals.
According to PRC Chairman Richard J. Gordon, with the collective overall response of the Red Cross Movement’s to “Yolanda,” the typhoon victims have been provided with a variety of services.
Gordon said that PRC has been present in Yolanda- affected areas since the emergency phase and up to now where recovery operations are ongoing in 10 areas.
He cited that the recovery assistance provided by the Red Cross include shelter, livelihood, water and sanitation, health facilities construction and rehabilitation, repair of classrooms, and training for capacity building, livelihood support, and disaster risk reduction.
“We have built one of the biggest, if not the biggest, number of houses in Yolanda-affected areas. We’re way ahead compared with everybody else, and we’re still building more,” the PRC chairman said.
To date, the Red Cross’ Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) Recovery Operations has reached 71 percent of its shelter commitment target, having built 59,143 houses from the 83,127 target houses amounting to more than P5.6 billion.
This is the largest ever shelter assistance that the Red Cross has provided in any post-disaster operations locally and globally in terms of number of houses built and amount of shelter assistance provided, Gordon said.
The Red Cross livelihood assistance to affected families has also reached more than 100 percent of its target.
“We have already accomplished our target number of beneficiaries for livelihood assistance and we are continuously adding beneficiaries to give more people a fresh start in life,” the PRC head said.
He added that out of the 50,000 target livelihood beneficiaries, there are now 58,574 households that have so far benefitted from Red Cross’ livelihood assistance, amounting to almost P586 million.
During the emergency phase, almost 91,000 families were given cash relief assistance that amounted to more than P290 million.
Livelihood assistance came in the form of conditional and unconditional cash grants which the beneficiaries used to bring back sources of income lost from the super typhoon or to start a new livelihood.
The livelihood assistance is also supported with skills trainings and enterprise development to further enhance the beneficiaries’ capacity to maintain and improve their sources of livelihood.
Hygiene promotion activities were conducted in communities, participated by more than 30,000 households, who now have increased knowledge on health and hygiene.
There are also 25 schools with improved access to water and sanitation facilities, the construction of which amounted to a total of P11.2 million.
Health has also been a major priority effort of the Red Cross with more than P19.2 million used for the repair and reconstruction of 24 health facilities.
To help improve people’s health awareness and to equip them with first aid knowledge, community-based health and first aid sessions were conducted in 121 communities.
In these trainings, 983 community health volunteers were trained and they can now attend to health emergencies in their own communities.
There are more than 42,000 individuals who were assisted with medical consultations, health promotion, health care referral, and supplemental feeding.
The PRC chairman said they also gave priority to education through school repairs and rehabilitation program that they conducted as early as two months after the typhoon.
To date, 222 classrooms of the total 400 targeted classrooms have been rehabilitated and reconstructed, amounting to P27.6 million.
A total of 4,681 school kits have already been distributed, and more school kits are to be distributed this school year.
To strengthen the communities’ capacity to handle future disasters, Red Cross 143 Teams with 44 members in each community were organized in 192 communities, with a total of 10.057 individual members.
These volunteers can provide critical information to the Red Cross in times of disasters that would be the basis for the organization’s response and interventions.
Trainings on disaster risk reduction management, first aid, and basic life support have also been conducted, further enhancing the communities’ capabilities to handle disasters. (PNA)