Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what progress her Department has made towards its commitment to increase spending on disaster risk reduction; and to which countries that additional funding has been allocated.

In response to the 2011 Humanitarian Emergency Response Review, DFID committed to embed disaster resilience within all country programmes, influencing DFID’s overall bilateral spend, rather than having a separate funding line for disaster risk reduction. For example:

• In Ethiopia, DFID contributes towards the Productive Safety Net Programme to address hunger and poverty for the poorest rural Ethiopians. The safety net is designed to increase their ability to deal with weather induced shocks. This approach has helped to reduce food stress for 10 million people.
• The Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme aims to benefit 5 million vulnerable people, especially women and children, in 13 developing countries. It will help them become more resilient to climate extremes and disasters, while gathering knowledge on how to avoid humanitarian disasters arising from climate extremes.
• In Kenya, DFID supported the Arid Lands Support Programme (ASP) to support the resilience of some 475,000 people. The programme included: the expansion of a pilot Index Based Livestock Insurance mechanism for poor pastoralists; improved fodder production and storage; and the building of community assets, such as water storage”.

More recently, the UK’s new Humanitarian policy aims to build on the commitments made at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, including the Grand Bargain. This will include continuing to provide core, un-earmarked funding to multilateral agencies but making sure our funding is conditional to progress made in delivering radical system-wide reform as well as continue to improve the international, national and local capacities to manage disasters.