A collaborative group of over a dozen leading international and national humanitarian aid agencies prepared a report on the floods that affected over nine million people in Pakistan in 2011. In his opinion for Dawn, Naseer Memon highlights the need of food, shelter, drinking water, sanitation facilities and medicine that remains in the absence of a robust early recovery plan and that leaves the poor even further marginalised.
He points the lack of political commitment on the part of the provincial government that further hinders assistance by the international humanitarian community and calls for disaster risk reduction and preparedness to be the top priority of the government, aid agencies and civil society. "We need to develop early warning systems and emergency evacuation plans, repair infrastructure and start planning; the trajectory of the past year’s failures needs to be altered," Naseer Memon concludes.