Community moves towards disaster-resilience
Kathmandu, 12 July 2018 - Ghushary cluster at Joshipur Rural Municipality-2 is one of the flood disaster-prone areas in Kailali district. 75 households live in the community. During monsoons, the community people face many problems like loss of life and property, damage to crop and soil erosion due to recurring flood. Since the settlement is flooded every year, it has become a common phenomenon for them. There are two rivers namely Kandha and Pathariya that flow through the community. The flood converts most of the cultivable land into unproductive land and washes away standing crops. That causes food insufficiency for them and they are compelled to go to India for seasonal labor.
Since January 2015, The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Nepal in partnership with Digo Bikash Samaj, a local implementing partner, started to work in this community under Nepal Development Program. It focused on social empowerment, resilient livelihood, income generation and poverty reduction. LWF Nepal started to integrate disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaption (CCA) into livelihoods". The community has developed action plans after conducting Participatory Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (PCVA) where potential disaster risks, their capacities and gaps to withstand worst situations were identified. They have also established community grain bank and emergency fund as a coping strategy for emergencies. Besides that, the project also supported group members to establish micro- enterprises, vegetable farming and riverbed farming which have given self-employment and employment to others.
Based on their DRR plan, the community members were motivated to implement mitigation activities. They planted 500 bamboo saplings and reed as multipurpose plants which are sources of income generation in addition to protecting the land from river cutting. In order to make the community disaster-resilient, the project supported to set up grain bank and emergency fund. The grain bank has a stockpile of 350kg rice, 50kg pulses, and 200kg wheat. The emergency fund has NPR 30,300. The community people have been organizing different events to increase their fund through Deusi celebration, monthly saving and seasonal grain collection. They distribute grains during emergency period as loan and the borrowers repay the loan during the harvest season.
Although the community faced flood during the monsoon of 2017, damage was very less in comparison to previous years. There were no human causality and none of them lost their farm land. The settlement was inundated and the displaced people took shelter at their relatives’ house and local school. In the meantime, they borrowed rice and pulses from grain bank and were provided ready-to-eat food including noodles, beaten rice and biscuits to children and elderly persons by utilizing the emergency funds. They also hand mike and gauge reader for early warning system and have first aid kits.
Now, they are coordinating with concerned stakeholders to protect their settlement from the flood in the rivers and are using other DRR safety net measures. The group members regularly meet and discuss on pertinent issues. They have also developed linkages with early warning mechanism at district level and have well trained taskforces teams. Similarly, community people are planning to construct plinth-raised houses and shelters to keep family members safer from inundation.
