NEMO’s Coordination in Social Protection to Prevent Double Dipping

Shelton DeFour

As the coordinating ministry, it ensures that people get a healthy start in life; good quality education is provided for children and employment. Also playing a role is NEMO, specifically as it relates to coping in times of disaster and post impact phase, which ensures that the most vulnerable get access to resources and assistance that they need.

Shelton DeFour, National Emergency Coordinator, NEMO

“You have to do standardized assessment so that we are not tripping over ourselves and duplicating efforts, giving the same persons who are affected…for example double dipping—Red Cross would give them assistance, NEMO would give them assistance and the Ministry of Human Development giving them assistance. So we have to standardize our system and we have to have a good database, if you wish, of those populations—those people that we know are vulnerable. So that we could then identify how do we share up this task or responsibility—who gets whatever village to go into or which part of the city, etc. So we want to make sure that duplication of efforts is reduced to the minimum and to have the ability to—how should I say—do immediate resurging of their resource line. We have been coordinating from the time NEMO form after Hurricane Mitch when it was formed, there is a need to have a NEMO system and the person who leads it is national emergency coordinator to ensure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. We have a lot of sessions and I think we do ourselves a disservice for not inviting you to so many sessions that we run around the country. On weekend, on holidays, our guys are training in the field, ensuring that people have a deep understanding. But this one is a bit unique in the sense that you are talking about how do people cope beyond a disaster after NEMO provides, for example, the immediate relief. We will be out there with the food and the water, the tabletop stove, bedding and the likes. But then you have the need for cash injection into households so that the kids could go to school, so that families can buy and pay for the basic needs. And these types of social protection systems offer that type of relief and it is beyond the NEMO operation. But it is correlated because if we see where there are certain gaps where we can participate in terms of storing the things that they would use and to make sure that we have the database of the names after the damage assessment to know exactly who qualify to get the assistance. So it is all interrelated.”