Your generosity has helped raise £1.4 million to aid people in Bangladesh and India affected by the devastating floods of August and September last year.
Six months on, thousands of the extreme poor in India’s flood-prone Bihar state and across Bangladesh are still struggling to get back on their feet even though the flood waters have long subsided.
Continued support is vital, particularly for women, children, indigenous peoples and dalits – people at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy - whose needs are often deprioritised in disasters because of their status.
Video of flooding in Bihar state, India
Rebuilding lives
We have already sent £785,000 during the first two phases of the relief programme. This has allowed 12 partners to provide more than 100,000 people in India and Bangladesh with food, clothing, medical care, essential household items and quick-growing vegetable seeds.
Christian Aid has now launched the third phase of its response programme, sending a further £359,000 to eight partners in Bangladesh and India.
In India, Christian Aid partners JUDAV and CASA are helping 5,000 families repair their homes, recover their livelihoods, re-establish water supplies and build raised flood shelters to better prepare themselves for the future.
In Bangladesh, the Christian Aid Emergency Response group’s recovery programme is being led by development organisation Gono Unnayan Prochesta.
A total of 8,757 families are being provided with seeds, materials for weaving, fish fry to restock ponds, toilets, tubewells, and money to repair and raise homes above flood levels.
Community seed huts and flood shelters will also be built to reduce devastation in future disasters.
Increasingly vulnerable
The floods in Asia and other extreme weather incidents around the world last year demonstrate just how vulnerable the poorest communities are to the effects of natural disasters.
Scientists associate rise in extreme weather with climate change.
In the aftermath of the floods, Bangladesh was dealt a double blow in November. Cyclone Sidr, the worst tropical storm to hit the region in at least 15 years, tore through the south of the country, killing more than 3,000, wrecking millions of homes and devastating vital cropland.
Leading scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change are already associating the frequency and severity of such extreme weather with the effects of climate change.
Given current predictions, the poor and marginalised in places such as Bangladesh and India face the greatest risks as they are the least able to cope with the consequences of climate change, as last year’s floods show.
Concerted action to cut emissions globally and to help poor countries and people adapt to the inevitable is vital.
How you can help
Please support our Asia floods appeal so we can continue to help those most in need – now and in the long term.
To make an online donation, click on the donation box on the right-hand side of this page.