POVERTY breeds disaster vulnerability, where those who have least in life risk life most. Thus, as disasters become more prevalent, the higher is the right of the poor to social protection, and the higher is the duty of government to reduce disaster risk in pursuit of resilient development. Disaster risk reduction is social justice in action.
Scaling-up our social protection program with more innovative means to build the resilience of poor families would help deliver the genuine reduction in poverty. Let’s examine how the government’s social protection programs, in particular the conditional cash transfer and other poverty reduction-related initiatives, can be enhanced to not only address structural poverty, but also build resilience against the recurring impact of natural hazards, which may well be holding them to the very poverty we are trying to address in the first place.
Yes, the government should grow the economy but also develop resilience through social protection. Efforts of the government to improve the quality of life for the majority of Filipinos are not felt as disasters continually bring us down. We cannot let disasters keep the poor forever poor. We cannot let recurrent disasters take away from our people their lives and the little that they have in life.
Economic losses in disasters are greatly felt by the poor because the effects are magnified in their life. The government should scale up existing national programs to rectify the social and economic structures that breed disaster risk and trap the poor in the vicious cycle of risk and poverty.
Tragedies such as “Ondoy”, “Sendong” and “Yolanda” create the context for learning and growing. It is these disasters that make us resilient. It is our shared memory of death, loss and survival that should drive us to build a resilient future.
