Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, Excellencies, Mr. Chairman,
I am Mohammad Alizamani from Housing Foundation of Iran
Housing Foundation of Iran is a nonprofit public organization founded in 1979, aims to provide housing for the underprivileged and low-income people in rural and urban regions as well as reconstruction of areas suffering damage from natural and man-made catastrophes within the framework and policies of the government of Islamic Republic of Iran.
Having its central office in Tehran, 30 general offices in each province capital and over 364 branches in different towns throughout the country, HOUSING FOUNDATION is present all over Iran. In addition, seven affiliated executive organizations perform under the authority of HOUSING FOUNDATION, supporting it achieving its ambitious goals. HOUSING FOUNDATIONperforms the reconstruction work in development and emergency contexts. In development and disaster risk reduction context, HOUSING FOUNDATION is committed to retrofitting and building of two million rural residential units during the two Five-year Development Plans of the country building 200,000 rural housing units annually. In emergency response context, reconstruction of rural and urban regions in five border provinces affected by Iran-Iraq war (1988), response to several natural disasters such as earthquakes of Gilan-Zanjan (1990), Aredebil (1997), Neka flood(1999), Avaj Qazvin (2002), Bam (2003), Lorestan (2006), Azarbaijan Sharghi ( 2013) and many more are among HOUSING FOUNDATION endeavors to eliminate the suffering of those affected by disasters.
As a disaster risk reduction and humanitarian oriented entity with more than 30 years experience of managing the pre-disaster mitigation and risk reduction as well as post-disaster recovery and reconstruction projects at the scale of a disaster-prone country of Iran we would to thank UNISDR for providing such an excellent opportunity for networking and exchangingthe knowledge and experiences in this field, and hereby I announce that we are ready to share our experiences in rural development, risk reduction, post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. We also welcome the exchange of knowledge and technologies with the global community especially in the field of urban disaster risk management
Ladies and Gentlemen, Excellencies and Mr. Chairman, at the end, once more I would like to highlight the comprehensive and simple message of UNISDR as to “invest today for safer tomorrow” as a key message for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Thank you very much for your attention