The country is vulnerable to periodic humanitarian emergencies of varying scale including avalanches, earthquakes and mudslides. Larger humanitarian emergencies, such as the devastating drought in 2001-2002, are an additional concern.
This PRRO aims to save lives by meeting the immediate food needs of victims of natural disasters, to protect the livelihoods of chronically food insecure households, to address critical nutritional requirements of vulnerable groups, to increase access to education and to reduce gender disparity through school feeding, and to create sustainable productive assets to improve the household food security of the country’s most vulnerable groups.
This PRRO’s strategy follows the recommendations of an external evaluation mission fielded in April 2006 to provide guidance on the future shape and scope of WFP assistance in Tajikistan in the face of declining resources. This mission concluded that a continuation of WFP assistance is needed after the termination of the current PRRO in June 2007 to enable the implementation of an exit strategy by consolidating and phasing out WFP support and incorporating the activities into the government budget.
Each activity under the new operation is thus conditional on a time bound exit strategy agreed with the Government of Tajikistan, which includes cost-sharing arrangements that will allow for WFP’s contribution to decrease to zero by the end of the PRRO.
The project strategy is closely aligned with the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, the wider National Development Strategy and the reforms identified in the 2005 Millennium Development Goals Needs Assessment. The latter is aimed at producing a conducive environment for achieving all eight Millennium Development Goals.
