The Nippon Foundation to Build 3 Community Halls in Tonga with Emergency Relief Fund
The Nippon Foundation has decided to build three community halls in Tonga as part a project to resettle people displaced by the January 15 eruption of the underwater Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano off the South Pacific island kingdom.
The construction will be financed by donations, totaling almost 200 million yen (about $1.49 million), to the Tonga Emergency Relief Fund the foundation established within days of the volcanic eruption to collect funds from the general public in Japan.
The decision came after the foundation dispatched Mr. Takehiro Umemura, senior program director of the Ocean Affairs Department, to the kingdom from October 26 to November 3. During the visit, he met with Tongan Prime Minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, Mr. Mosese Vakasiuola, project manager spearheading the resettlement plan, and other senior government officials, including the vice ministers of construction and fisheries, as well as representatives of the Japanese Embassy and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to discuss how the donations from Japan should be used.
As I posted in this blog on November 10, the delivery of the humanitarian assistance has been delayed due mainly to the lack of communications routes between the Tongan embassy in Tokyo and the home government in the aftermath of the eruption and ensuing tsunami, and the closure of the kingdom’s borders amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
But as things began to settle down in the kingdom, we sent Mr. Umemura there in line with the foundation’s basic policy of providing humanitarian and other assistance to foreign countries only after confirming people’s actual needs.
The construction cost of the community halls is estimated at about $200,000 per hall, with completion set for the spring of 2023. They will be built in three areas where displaced residents are being resettled and will help foster community life. The Tongans said they hoped the remainder of the funds would be spent on purchasing outboard engines for fishing boats.
The tsunami generated by the eruption destroyed over 600 structures, including at least 300 residential houses, displacing more than 1,500 persons and causing four deaths, according to the Tongan government, which said that the entire population of more than 100,000 people had been impacted.
By the end of July, the Tonga Emergency Relief Fund received 197,271,800 yen (about $1,465,000) from 25,409 donors. The total includes 100 million yen (about $743,000) the foundation contributed and 10 million yen (about $74,300) Ms. Kanae Minato, a popular Japanese writer of crime fiction and thrillers, donated to launch the fund.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the donors for their generous contributions. Although things are not unfolding as expeditiously as we would wish in the disaster-stricken South Pacific kingdom, I sincerely hope that the community halls will be handed over to the Tongans as scheduled since this is what we promised the prime minister.
The foundation’s latest decision followed the announcement on November 21 by the NIWA-Nippon Foundation Tonga Eruption Seabed Mapping Project (TESMaP) that January’s eruption of the underwater volcano was confirmed as largest ever recorded. TESMaP, a joint initiative of the foundation and New Zealand's National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), has completed the fullest investigation to date into the volcanic eruption.
Please refer to NIWA’s website for the full press release.