This document presents baseline data on Fijian local building culture and coping strategies that can be useful to consider in designing and setting up habitat and disaster risk reduction programmes.
This booklet aims to provide simple Build Back Safer tips to allow better understanding of construction principles and measures to make your house stronger and more resilient to natural disaster.
Humanitarian actors are working with the Fijian Government to train hundreds of community carpenters and workers in safer building techniques so that the country can better withstand future cyclones. Photo and Story Credit: UNOCHA/Danielle Parry.
Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Winston, one of the most severe ever recorded in the South Pacific, hit Fiji on 20 and 21 February. The government declared a State of Natural Disaster for 60 days and officially requested international assistance. Nearly 350,000 people who lived in the cyclone’s path were affected.
The Government of Fiji has led the overall response to TC Winston. To coordinate the shelter response, Shelter Cluster Fiji was activated (after having first been activated for TC Evan in 2012), and it has been led by the Ministry of Local Government, Housing & Environment (MoLGH&E) with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as the humanitarian co-lead agency. A Shelter Coordination Team was deployed by IFRC to support the Ministry for the shelter response to TC Winston.
As of July, 2016 representatives from more than 58 organizations and agencies have attended Shelter Cluster Fiji meetings for the TC Winston response, and continue to receive regular information sharing and updates. 29 organizations and agencies have reported shelter activities so far for the TC Winston response. Shelter Cluster Fiji partners, including the Government of Fiji, have distributed over 27,600 households worth of emergency shelter, including tents, tarpaulins, shelter kits and shelter tool kits, and have distributed over 50,000 shelter items in total over the Flash Appeal period (end of May, 2016).
Shelter Cluster Fiji is working closely with the Government of Fiji, humanitarian partners and other stakeholders to continue to address identified gaps in the response, as well as to advocate for further funding and support to owner- driven recovery and Build Back Safer (BBS) awareness and technical training. The objective for partners is to implement these activities to complement the Government’s ‘Help for Homes Initiative’, which aims to provide thousands of affected Fijians with access to free building materials so that they can get a start in the repair and rebuild process after TC Winston.
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Overview