Glide No: EP-2022-000298-MWI
EVENTS TIMELINE
10 March 2023: Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services (DCCMS) issues warning for Tropical Cyclone Freddy.
10 March 2023: Malawi Red Cross Society (MRCS) deploys National Response teams to 10 priority districts. Danish Red Cross makes funds available for early action.
12 March 2023: Freddy starts to impact the southern region of the country.
13 March 2023: President of Malawi declares state of disaster in some districts of the southern region.
13 March 2023: IFRC releases funds to MRCS for lifesaving action including Search & Rescue and rapid assessment.
14 March 2023: IFRC Surge Team deployed including rapid response personnel and Emergency Response Unit (ERU)
17 March 2023: Initial reports indicate 86,604 households displaced, representing approximately 362,928 people. This will increase to 126,511 households and 563,771 people by 24 March.
17 March 2023: IFRC issues Emergency Appeal for CHF 6 million, to cover 160,000 people.
25 July 2023: IFRC publishes the Operational Strategy for the Appeal.
31st August 2023: Emergency Response phase closes.
10th to 11th August 2023: Humanitarian Actors holds TC Freddy review meeting in Blantyre, Malawi.
1st September 2023: Recovery plan starts.
A. SITUATION ANALYSIS
Description of the crisis
Malawi was one of the countries greatly affected by Tropical Cyclone Freddy, among others, Mozambique and Madagascar. On 4th March 2023, The Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services issued a warning informing the Malawi nation that FREDDY had developed into Moderate Tropical Storm and was continuing to intensify in the Mozambique Channel and other models indicated that there was a likely high chance of FREDDY recurving towards Mozambique coast. Following the advisory, MRCS initiated an anticipatory action approach tailored to ensuring that the society is prepared in terms of prepositioning of stock, early action plans, and awareness raising on Early Warning to the communities, especially in the targeted areas. In the background, the team continued to monitor other global models to countercheck the prediction and probabilities of the forecast and lead times. The deployed MRCS National Response Team (NRT) targeted the highly projected districts which receive high rainfall amounts which included Blantyre, Phalombe, Mulanje Thyolo, Chikwawa, Nsanje, and Zomba.
This report also indicated that heavy rains associated with strong winds started on 11th and 12th March 2023. TC Freddy lashed most of the districts bringing strong winds and heavy rains. In a matter of hours' communities were being washed out by significant floods and mudslides. It was also revealed that most risk areas were also the same as that of TC Ana. This increased the vulnerabilities of the people as they were not fully recovered from the latter.
On 13th March, a state of disaster was declared in the 14 districts that were severely affected by the cyclone. On 17th March 2023 an Emergency Appeal was launched by MRCS through IFRC. The overall goal of the appeal is to enable 160,000 people (32,000 households) affected by TC Freddy in five affected districts (Blantyre, Chikwawa, Nsanje, Mulanje and Phalombe) to meet their essential needs in a safe and dignified manner, recover from the crisis and strengthen their resilience to future shocks. The government through DODMA made a declaration to close all camps by 17th April 2023, this came after a monitoring visit which showed that there were over 503 camps across the affected district, most of these camps were in schools, and as such they compromised learning. To ensure that the decommissioning process was smooth, the government with support from other partners supported the decommissioning where some beneficiaries were given either Non Food Items (NFIs) or cash as a return package.
Due to the magnitude of the impact, most vulnerable people are still struggling to recover from this shock although a smaller number of the affected households have managed to relocate to higher and safe areas. The intensity of the impact has been aggravated by the outbreak of Cholera, which has affected a number of districts.