MORE than 66,000 families now have safer, more disaster-resilient homes in Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan)-affected areas, as the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) has already completed 86 percent of its target number of homes to be built in its shelter project under its Haiyan recovery program.
As of this week, a total of 66,011 families have been provided with homes. The Red Cross aims to provide homes to 80,203 families. The homes are scheduled for completion until the end of 2016.
This is the largest-ever shelter assistance that the Red Cross has provided in any postdisaster operations locally and globally, in terms of number of houses built and amount of shelter assistance provided. The shelter project covers the provinces of Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Cebu, Eastern Samar, Iloilo, Leyte, Palawan and Western Samar, as well as the cities of Bogo, Ormoc and Tacloban.
“We aim to do more for the Yolanda victims, and this would not be possible without all the kind-hearted corporations and individuals, and our Red Cross and Red Crescent partners and other organizations worldwide, who donated to the effort,” PRC Chairman Richard Gordon said in a news conference at the PRC headquarters on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, Mandaluyong City.
In building shelter, the PRC involves the community in all aspects of the building process. The beneficiaries themselves were part of the consultations regarding designs and plans for the shelters that the Red Cross and its partners built for them. Beneficiaries were even involved in the actual building of the houses.
Houses built through the PRC housing project were built employing the “build back better” principle for disaster resilience and have been proven to withstand some of the strongest typhoons that came after Yolanda.
The housing project is supported by PRC’s partners in the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, composed of the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and several national societies.