Lia Poggio (IOM) on the situation in Venezuela following the earthquakes - Press Conference

Okay.
I will leave you with our guests.
If we could if we could put Leah and Lucas on the screen, that would be great.
Thank you.
Great.
Hi, guys.
We're delighted to be joined by La Pogo, Chief of Mission in Venezuela for IOM and her colleague Lucas Gwys Hukart, IOM's disaster risk reduction coordinator.
You're speaking from Caracas.
We'll let you make some opening remarks and then we'll take some questions.
Thank you.
Great.
Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to brief you today.
The International Organization for Migration has launched an appeal to support people and communities affected by the devastating earthquake that struck Venezuela on 24 June.
The earthquakes and subsequent aftershock caused extensive damage across several states, including La Guaya that is the most affected one, District of capital, Miranda, Cagg, Aragua, rakuy, and Falcon.
Thousands of families have been displaced while homes, health facilities, water system, and other critical infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed, disrupting the access to essential services and increasing the vulnerabilities of the population.
While significant response efforts are currently underway, humanitarian needs remain considerable.
Many displaced families continue to face uncertainty regarding their housing situation, access to health care, and their ability to meet the basic daily needs.
The appeal will guide IOM response over the next 12 months and seek funding to provide lifesaving assistance, safe and dignified shelter, support early recovery efforts and help the affected community to rebuild their lives in the months ahead.
Over the past three weeks, we have also witnessed something that was very remarkable, the solidarity of the Venezuelan people.
Community have come together to support one another.
Local authorities have worked tirelessly and humanitarian partners have mobilized rapidly to assist those affected.
The collective effort has been vital in addressing the immediate needs and will remain critical in helping the community to move forward.
Since the onset of the emergency and for three weeks, IM has been working alongside the Venezuelan authorities, the UN partners, and the humanitarian organization to support the affected population through a coordination mechanism that has been established between the host government, the UN, and the humanitarian partners, as coordination in keys in this response.
And as I speak to you today, our teams remain deployed across affected areas, working with communities and local authorities to improve the condition in collective sites, expand access to health care protection services, coordinate assistance, and help the families regain access to essential services.
To date, IOM has assisted almost 7,000 people in displacement site under its co coordination mechanism and deliver over 10,000 services including temporary accommodation, healthcare, psychosocial support, and protection assistance.
Building on our longstanding presence in Venezuela and the operational footprint across the affected areas, IOM is now scaling up their response through an integrated approach that address both the immediate humanitarian needs and the medium and long term recovery priorities.
While the humanitarian assistance remains in sectional, the response is increasing shifting towards the early recovery.
Support housing solution, restoring critical infrastructure, rebuilding the livelihoods, and reducing the risk of retractor displacement will be critical to helping families and the communities move forward with dignity and hope.
This appeal focus on priority areas including shelter and coordination, early recovery, and access to basic services, including health.
Together, all this intervention will provide immediate relief while laying in foundation for mid and long term recovery.
As a chief of mission of IOM in Venezuela, I have seen firsthand both the devastating impact of this disaster and extraordinary resilience of the affected communities.
Yet recovery will take time, resources, and sustained commitment.
IOM remains committed to ensuring that affected people remain at the center of the response and recovery effort.
Working closely with government authorities, local communities, and humanitarian partners, we will continue to support a coordinated need based approach that reaches the most affected, included in underserved areas.
We urge donors and international community to support this appeal and the response and stand with the people of Venezuela at this very critical moment.
The needs created by the disaster will not disappear as attention might shift elsewhere.
Continuous support would be essential to help families to reconnect with their communities, to rebuild their homes, restore their livelihoods, and create a condition for a safer and more sustainable future.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much.
I took over from Stephan.
I'm Stephanie, just so you know who I am.
We will now turn to questions.
Ephraim, go ahead.
Thank you, Stephanie.
Thank you so much for this briefing on behalf of the United Nations Correspondent Association, thank you for giving us this update today.
I have two questions.
What is the nature of the relationship between IOM right now and other agencies? You said there's a coordinated approach.
How is that going? How smooth is it going? How satisfied are you with the coordination thing? Is there room for improvement? What would make it even better? And second, you mentioned the international response.
How would you assess it so far? How has the response been really up to the level needed now for the victims of the earthquake? Thank you.
There were an already existing coordination structure in the country under the lead of OCHA.
And so we have been able to quickly respond to the emergencies after the earthquake.
I think that the coordination has been positive, and then we establish a coordination mechanism, as I mentioned you before.
With the host government that has been key in order to provide the immediate assistance.
So the mechanism that we establish is based on current capacity and also in the services that can be provided to the affected population.
So in our perspective, the coordination effort has been important key and there is always waiting for improvement, but so far, I think that we achieved our main objectives that we was to provide immediate support.
In terms of coordination, we are also thinking about the activation of the shutters cluster that will be also a key space in order to continue supporting and coordinating not only the shutter support, but all the early recovery efforts.
Thank you.
Go ahead, Abdel Hamid.
Thank you so much for debriefing.
My name is Abdul Hamid.
I'm from the Arabic Daily, Al Kutz Arab.
I have two questions.
First, a question on the AOS, what are they doing? Are they coordinating also with the local authorities and which countries of the OOS stands high in their rescue effort.
The second, Venezuela is supposed to be a rich country and an oil exporting country.
Why this kind of devastation and the government is not doing anything or how do you assist the efforts of the Venezuelan government to address this tragedy? Thank you.
Yeah, we are supporting the government health forces, as I mentioned before, and under the leadership of the humanitarian country teams, the different international actors have been like supporting the government to respond quickly to the situation.
And In this kind of situation, the coordination is key because there is no country that is able to rapidly response to an earthquake or natural disaster by its own.
This is why it has been key that we were able to coordinate.
I think that the fact that the UN agencies in the world humanitarian actors will be present in the country since many years has allowed us to quickly coordinate with the government and to strengthen their capacity.
So the coordination mechanism that is being established is with the host government, both the military and civil actors.
A.
If I may go ahead.
Yeah, if I may add to what Leah is saying.
And I think it sort of answers one of the previous questions as well in terms of how this response is being coordinated with the government, but leveled up to see to the needs of people in need So the UN system has been engaging and coordinating very closely with the Venezuelan government and the authorities.
The resident and humanitarian coordinator has played a key role in facilitating discussions with key stakeholders in country to ensure that we have access that we are able to reach those most in need Um, as Leah has just said and going to the very last question that was asked, I believe whenever disaster struck in this magnitude, we're talking about two earthquakes of 7.6 and 7.4 magnitude that nourish their scale.
So obviously, as much as any government could be prepared for this, it's never going to be enough.
The array of destruction is quite significant.
So as UN agencies and as the UN system, we have been working closely with the governmental authorities trying to support them in their recovery efforts and on the emergency immediate immediate emergency assistance for people in need.
And while, of course, the role of coordinating everyone remains and is the role of the resident coordinator, we must recognize the key role that other UN agencies, sister agencies, and humanitarian partners have had so far in quickly scaling up this response, bringing in expertise and really responding, being first respondents on the ground.
We've all acted very quickly as the day after the earthquake.
Go ahead.
Oops, I think your microphone, sorry.
Let's try again.
How many people have you been able to reach and how many people are still left without any assistance? We have been able to reach around 10,000 people, and in all the collective side that have been established in the country from the government, there are currently 20,000 people and all of them have received the assistance both through the government and with the support of the UN agencies.
And let me go ahead, then I will take a question on that.
Thank you.
This is top three with China central television.
As we know, China has provided emergency assistance to manage following the earthquake.
How has this aid already reached the affected areas and what additional support is still urgently needed from the international partners? So I believe in terms of tracking the aid specific aid from the Chinese government or any other member state, IOM wouldn't be the best place agency to give the answer.
The the agency that keeps track of humanitarian funding is OCHA, so I would probably to ask you to coordinate with our colleagues at OCHA, both at New York level but also here in country.
But then in regards to the second part of your question, what are the gaps that remain and the needs that remain, our Chief of mission has sort of explained this in her intervention, but shelter and site coordination remain some of the key areas of need still.
The government is also trying to remove all of the debris in the aftermath of the quake.
So there's a lot of room for support in that specific area as well.
Not to mention providing provision of basic services such as health and protection assistance as well.
And I'll just wrap it up by mentioning that, of course, we cannot, not mention early recovery efforts that need to kick in as quickly as possible as we quickly transition from the emergency humanitarian assistance into providing people with more durable solutions.
Let me go online.
Now we have a question from Bloomberg, Magdalena, Hi, this is Magdalena deber with Bloomberg News.
Actually have two questions.
The first is it seems like a lot of the emergency responders, the international responders that came straightaway have started to withdraw.
I'm wondering what kind of gaps they're leaving and what you need the most in this phase of the recovery process.
Then my second question is whether there's any unexpected secondary effects or fears that came as surprises like maybe the water is being polluted and there's cholera or anything that you weren't prepared for that now you have to deal with.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, Madalena.
In regards to the emergency responders that seem to be withdrawing, maybe a good point to clarify is that the teams that are withdrawing from the country are the search and rescue teams mostly.
And that is because it has been 20 days more or less since the earthquakes happened.
And so the work right now isn't more unfortunately, trying to search and rescue for people who are alive, but rather it transitions into recovering people that have passed.
So it's a different expertise, let's say, technically, it's a bit of a different type of work.
So the teams that have been withdrawing were the ones doing search and rescue.
But I can confirm to you that humanitarian actors continue to be on the ground and are continuing to scale up their emergency assistance programming.
In regards to your second question in terms of unexpected secondary effects or fears that we have, we are, of course, working very closely together with the government and with UNDP here in country on the matter, like I said, of the debris removal and why am I mentioning this? Because one of the concerns that we have has to do with the environmental impact of where the debris is going to be how to handle manage the debris and where it's going to be put.
And we cannot ignore the fact that collectively as UN system, we've been talking a lot lately about a really strong El Nino system developing and this could hit Venezuela in a moment where people are already displaced.
This is something that IOM specifically has been taking really into consideration and discussing with other partners how we can make sure that adverse factors coming from, for example, a strong El Nino could impact the work that we're doing.
Discussions are being held at the interagency level to ensure that our response remains operational at this critical time.
Thank you very much additional information that I think that is in response to some of the questions that have been raised to respond to rapid response to the earthquake emergency.
The humanitarian country team prepared an addendum to the 2027 humanitarian response plan.
And so this addendum expand the response to reach 1.3 million people affected by the earthquake that require also additional funds.
And the addendum is based on a rapid need assessment that have been done after the earthquake and have been conducted in the different affected states.
And the funding confirmed that the need for a multi sectoral response and underlined three main area of impact, deteriorating of living condition, loss of livelihoods and purchasing power, and loss of housing with consequences for shelter, community and cohesion.
And so in terms of the main needs identified following the earthquake, are in psychosocial support and health, access to safe water, food security, psychosocial support, shelter, and sanitation.
As IOM, we start focusing our response on shelter because it has been established by the host government as a key priority because for them was key to find a place to provide not only accommodation, but also services to those that have been lost to their houses after the earthquake.
Thank you so much.
I don't see any more questions.
So thank you to both of you for joining us today.
As a reminder, we had La Pogio, the chief of mission in Venezuela for IOM, and she was accompanied by Lucas Gerres Accra, IOM's disaster risk reduction coordinator also in Venezuela and they joined us from Cacas.
Thank you so much again and good luck with the continuation of your work.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, everyone.
Goodbye.
Thank you.