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United Nations tsunami envoy former United States President Bill Clinton continued his anniversary tour of regions devastated by the Indian Ocean disaster, visiting the Indonesian province of Aceh, the most ravaged area, and calling for a balance between the need for quick results and the achievement of lasting outcomes.

Full Story // UNDP Indonesia Country Office // DRU and Indonesia // UNDP Tsunami Recovery Website // UNDP-DRU Tsunami website

In a rare display of solidarity, the international community on Saturday pledged more than US $5.8 billion in assistance to quake-devastated Pakistan.

"We are really touched by your generosity, by your feeling of sharing our grief," Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said at the closing session of this weekend's international donor conference in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Full Story // Speech by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at donor conference // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Pakistan today for an international donors’ conference on reconstruction after last month’s devastating earthquake, declaring “we need much, much more to help the people in need” as UN staff on the ground stressed the desperate shortfall in required funding.

“I would expect the world, those with capacity, to be generous and to give, and give willingly and I am not just speaking to governments, I am also speaking to the private sector and individuals who have been generous in other situations. I call on all of them to help us here as well,” Mr. Annan said of Saturday’s conference.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme are committed to supporting Pakistan in implementing its National Volunteer Movement (NVM), an initiative launched on 1 November to respond to the massive relief and reconstruction effort in quake-devastated areas of Pakistan.

The UNDP Country Director in Pakistan, Mr. Haoliang Xu, pledged UNDP and UNV support at a joint stakeholder meeting in the Pakistani capital on Tuesday.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

In the lead-up to a major earthquake conference in Pakistan, the Government and the United Nations (UN) today released a detailed plan for assisting the millions affected by the October 8 disaster to recover during the next 12 to 18 months.

“The UN is operating lifesaving and recovery efforts at the same time,” says UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Pakistan, Jan Vandemoortele. “Under this plan we will work to bridge the phase from relief to reconstruction by shifting from saving lives to restoring livelihoods,” he says.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

At a United Nations meeting in Dakar, Senegal, tomorrow, humanitarian and development officials will discuss food security in Africa’s Sahel, a band of land south of the Sahara hit by drought and locusts.

“It is unacceptable that, in a world of plenty, the majority of a population of more than 68 million people are malnourished or constantly threatened by famine, that children die because they are badly or insufficiently nourished,” said UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Margareta Wahltsröm.

Full Story // UNDP Niger Country Office (Photo IRIN)

The international community needs to spend "several billions of dollars in immediate cash" to stave off a humanitarian crisis in Pakistan-ruled Kashmir, according to the chairman of an international donor conference to be held this week.

Kemal Dervis, the head of the UN Development Programme, acknowledged that the relief effort had struggled to raise the required $550m (£314m) from its instant appeal and that the $130m pledged so far was "clearly insufficient".

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

As winter sweeps into the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan devastated by the October 8 earthquake, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched an initiative this week aimed at assisting 30,000 families in high altitude, rural areas to build locally designed winterized shelters from the rubble of their homes and locally available materials.

Participating families in the Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Mansehra, Shangla and Neelum districts, will receive a tool kit, iron sheeting for a pitched roof, and technical assistance on how to build and winterize their new shelters. 150 local engineers and more than one thousand building workers, who are being trained under the initiative, will provide this assistance.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework
(Photo IRIN)

Multilateral donor agencies have estimated the preliminary relief and reconstruction cost of the devastating October 8 earthquake at $5.2 billion which is “likely to rise as more damaged areas are surveyed”.

This was announced here on Friday by Dr Salman Shah, adviser to the prime minister on finance and revenue, along with country heads of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and United Nations Development Programme as part of “Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment Report”, prepared jointly by more than 12 international organisations and governments.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

Aid agencies are prioritising help for Pakistani earthquake survivors, focusing on high-altitude communities, but that is leaving others vulnerable as sickness spreads, a U.N. official said on Friday.

The Oct. 8 quake killed more than 73,000 people in Pakistan, most of them in Pakistani Kashmir. Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless and, with many mountain roads blocked by landslides, aid has yet to reach many in remote areas.

"The big concern is now that because of the limitation of the resources we have, we are prioritising and trying to reach the population living in remote highlands," Rashid Khalikov, U.N. aid coordinator said in Muzaffarabad, the hard-hit capital of Pakistani Kashmir.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

South Asian nations agreed on Thursday to set up a disaster management centre in India to help the region better handle calamities like tsunamis, earthquakes and floods that have ravaged it in the past year.

The agreement came at a meeting of South Asian officials in the Bangladeshi capital, ahead of a Nov. 12-13 summit of regional leaders which aims to push a long-standing goal of economic integration to achieve higher growth.

Full Story // UNDP India Country Office // DRU and India // UNDP Tsunami Recovery Website // UNDP-DRU Tsunami website

While the food supply in Niger is improving, with favourable rains portending good harvests next season, recent surveys by the United Nations spell continuing danger of a renewed hunger crisis in rural areas, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

Many households continue to grapple with the effects of last year's drought and an invasion by hordes of locusts which affected some 3.6 million people in March and April of this year, according to an OCHA release which cites studies conducted by the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

Long-term effects including indebtedness, the sale of household assets to pay debts, and the loss of livestock, which traditionally constitutes many families' sole safety net.

Full Story // UNDP Niger Country Office

A donors' conference on rebuilding the parts of Pakistan devastated by October's earthquake will focus on longer term regeneration as well as immediate humanitarian needs, the head of the UNDP said on Wednesday.

U.N. Development Programme Administrator Kemal Dervis told Reuters shelter would be a top priority at a Nov. 19 meeting in the Pakistani capital Islamabad but that agencies had to start discussing how to build employment and infrastructure as well.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

Globalization challenges, earthquake relief, and long-term recovery from natural disasters dominate the agenda of UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis’ first official visit to Asia, which began in India today.

Dervis continues on to Thailand and Pakistan, where he will join UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on a tour of earthquake devastated areas of the country on November 18th and will represent the United Nations with the Secretary-General at an international conference on earthquake recovery in Islamabad the following day. The earthquake left more than 87,000 dead and three million people homeless.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

Stepping up relief to the victims of Pakistan's devastating earthquake, the United Nations and the inter-governmental International Organization for Migration (IOM) now have 300 staff in the disaster area, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

Giving a balance sheet of operations in the first month since the 8 October disaster, OCHA cited on the health front the prevention of epidemic outbreaks of major communicable diseases as a big achievement, with 300,000 children vaccinated against measles so far.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan // UN Early Recovery Framework

Despite a global effort to improve disaster preparedness, least developed countries (LDCs) remain ill equipped to deal with the impact of natural calamities and need further international aid to do so, according to a senior United Nations development official.

“In the case of the most vulnerable countries, we must realize that the impact of disasters becomes doubly magnified,” the High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, Anwarul K. Chowdhury, told the General Assembly yesterday.

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A meeting was held on Tuesday at the Finance Ministry between government representatives and local heads of donor agencies from UNDP, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, DFID, the EU and the Japan Bank of International Cooperation to review the progress of the compilation of data on damage assessment and the rehabilitation of the earthquake victims.

The meeting was informed that the first draft of the damage assessment report jointly prepared by the WB, the ADB and the UN will be ready by November 5 and will be finalised by November 12 in consultation with the Pakistan government and all stakeholders. The report will comprise two volumes and the first volume will include strategies and options to complete the relief and recovery phase in the first twelve months. The second part, relating to the reconstruction of houses and infrastructure, will be implemented in 48 to 60 months.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan

Nearly one month after hurricane Stan devastated parts of Central America with flooding and landslides, nearly 50,000 displaced people in Guatemala and El Salvador remain unable to return to their homes and United Nations efforts to raise money for humanitarian relief have not been met with adequate funds.

"Tens of thousands of people in Central America continue to suffer the ravages of Hurricane Stan," UN Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator Yvette Stevens said today, ahead of an information meeting convened by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on assistance to the affected communities.

Full Story // UNDP El Salvador Country Office // UN El Salvador Emergency Response // Joint UN Agency Appeal in El Salvador for victims of flooding and volcanic eruptions // OCHA Situation Reports // UNDP Guatemala Country Office // Hurricane Stan: UN emergency site// UN Guatemala Flash Appeal

Pakistan on Wednesday dramatically increased the official death toll from the devastating earthquake that hit the north of the country last month to 73,276 and said it could rise further.

Federal Relief Commissioner Major-General Farooq Ahmed Khan said the sharp rise from a figure of 57,600 given a day earlier could be related to concerted efforts to clear debris since the Oct. 8 disaster.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan (Photo IRIN)

Three months before the tsunami grabbed world headlines, the island paradise of Grenada was ripped by Hurricane Ivan. The world responded generously at the time, but seven months later most of the country’s housing remains in ruins; an example of how disaster recovery needs the sustained support of the international community.

Full Story // UNDP Grenada Country Office // DRU and Grenada

United Nations agencies are working flat out to bring help to hundreds of thousands of survivors of Pakistan’s worst-ever earthquake before the onslaught of the harsh Himalayan winter further impedes access, but major funding shortfalls are hampering the efforts.

“This really is a race against time and the weather. If we lose, people are going to suffer even more,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis told a news briefing in Geneva today, noting that Pakistani staff, including truck drivers, have agreed to work right through this week’s Muslim Eid holiday.

Full Story // UNDP Pakistan Country Office // UNDP Projects and other information // UN Emergency Response: Pakistan Earthquake 2005 // UN South Asia Earthquake Flash Appeal (updated) // DRU and Pakistan (Photo IRIN)