More than 66,000 families now have safer, more disaster-resilient homes in Typhoon “Yolanda” (Haiyan)-affected areas, as the Philippine Red Cross has already completed 86 percent of its target number of homes to be built in its shelter project under its Typhoon Haiyan recovery program.
So far, a total of 66,011 families were provided homes out of the target 80,203, scheduled for completion until the end of 2016. 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.
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,” said PRC chairman Richard Gordon in a press conference at the PRC Headquarters in Edsa.
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.
RCRC National Societies involved in the Haiyan housing project include the Finnish Red Cross, Spanish Red Cross, German Red Cross, Hong Kong Red Cross, Taiwan Red Cross, French Red Cross, Japanese Red Cross, Norwegian Red Cross, British Red Cross, American Red Cross, Australian Red Cross, Netherlands Red Cross, Palang Merah Indonesia or Indonesian Red Cross, Qatar Red Crescent Society, Swiss Red Cross, and Bahrain Red Crescent.
PRC’s private partners that have contributed to the housing project include Air Asia, HSBC, CUBE, Citibank, and AusAID.