Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 — a service provided by UN OCHA

Maldives

Maldives Annual Report 2013 (MAAMV001)

Attachments

Overview

Maldivian Red Crescent (MRC) has been working steadily towards achieving the planned outcome and output targets in the field of disaster management, health, organisational development (OD), including youth programmes and establishing itself as a well-functioning National Society.

Due to the political instability within the country, MRC along with other government and non-government agencies and organisations found it challenging to implement any activity at community level. Hence the implementation rate of project implementation has been lower than expected in 2013.

In disaster management (DM) programme significant efforts were made to strengthen MRC’s position to respond to emergencies in an effective and timely manner. In effect to this, several trainings were conducted to build capacities of MRC staff and volunteers for future disaster response. It has shown considerable progress in establishing an emergency response mechanism at all levels. MRC developed an emergency response training handbook for facilitators which will serve as a reference guide for facilitators while conducting future emergency response team (ERT) trainings. At the organisational level, revisions of response mechanism, policies and plans have seen significant progress. In particular, the standard operating procedures (SOPs) were revised to include emergency operation unit1 and national emergency committee2 .

Under the health and social care programme, MRC continued to provide first aid services in target programme communities through its pool of trained human resource at branch level. Three out of five MRC branches have started delivering first aid services in their respective community. The development of the MRC health strategy was initiated in December 2013 with participation from various stakeholders and Maldives national health systems. MRC’s health strategy will be finalized and presented to the governing board by March 2014.

In an effort to strengthen prevention activities in communities to support increased community resilience /sustainable development, a toolkit for epidemic control for volunteers was contextualized and translated with the objective of having a mechanism in place to mobilize volunteers in the three priority MRC branches during a health epidemic.

In 2013, with the initiation of the youth and OD plan, MRC focused on the development of three strategic branches. The project agreements with partners were finalized and funding made available to MRC by the second quarter to start implementation in the third and fourth quarter. MRC had taken considerable steps to develop, empower and mobilize youth to lead in developing and implementing local level programmes. To mention MRC has initiated a pilot project which aims at youth involvement in school programme at school/local level. The Red Crescent Circle (RCC) development guidelines were approved by the MRC governing board in December 2013.

Being a volunteer based organisation, MRC operation is based on its volunteer involvement in various programmes. In order to track volunteer, member and staff information MRC acquired and started using the resource mobilization information (RMI) system setup by the IFRC.