The Nigerian Government says it’s looking beyond the present by building a more robust system of disaster management in the country.
The Director General, DG, National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA Mustapha Ahmed said this at the close of a week-long capacity-building workshop, held in Abuja, Nigeria.
According to him, the move will enable all relevant stakeholders to not only be aware of disasters and humanitarian crises but also be prepared to carry out their roles.
The DG stated that this informed the wide range of collaboration and partnership engaged by the Agency in the delivery of its mandates.
“Thus, this programme was designed to strengthen the capacity of the participants in the areas of Humanitarian Coordination Mechanism; Disaster Management Cycle and Institutional Capacity; Resource Mobilization; Information Management; Community-based Disaster Management; Search and Rescue; Incident Command System; Disaster Preparedness; Risk Management; and Early Warning System among others”, he explained
He disclosed that middle-level staff were targeted for the capacity building workshop with the view that as operational officers, they are in the best position to apply the skills learnt to mentor those behind them and better prepare for future leadership roles in Disaster management.
This, he noted was in line with the increasing global complexity and impacts of disasters.
” The decision to bring together staff of NEMA and SEMAs at this joint capacity building is deliberate to foster cooperation, collaboration, experience sharing and enhance synergy between the Federal and State Agencies in the delivery of their mandates”.
Speaking on behalf of the International partners, the Head of the Government Liaison Unit, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA, Ibrahima Barry said it was pertinent for the Government of Nigeria to take the lead in coordinating responses to disasters and humanitarian crises in the country.
He said the role of the intergovernmental agencies is basically to support the coordination based on humanitarian policy and on personal experience, bearing in mind the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
“What we did as UN was to deploy the UNDAC team to organise and help the government in coordinating the response. It took us a long time to know that the epicentre of the earthquake was not in Port au Prince, but in reality, we didn’t work properly with the government because most of our meetings were held in English when Haiti is a French-speaking country”.
” Later when we realised it, we went to them, discussing with them, working with them and they told us that the epicentre was in Leogane”.
” So we went again and started working and later when we started working with the Civil Society and the community, we realised that there were so many people, thousands of people underground”, Barry explained.
Mr Barry further emphasised that collaborating with governments and communities of disaster is key to getting first-hand information for effective humanitarian response.
” From our side, that’s UNOCHA, we really enforce the collaboration, that’s why our Head of office is always in contact with the DG NEMA, we work with the technical team in Abuja, but also at the State level, we make sure that we maintain the collaboration “.
He disclosed that UNOCHA will create a communication network to keep participants abreast of situations and maintain contact.
For his part, the Operations Manager, of the International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC, Mr Hopewell Munyari said the organisation has the same mandate as NEMA because they’re the emergency response mechanism of the country.
He said there’s a need for continuous strengthening of State Emergency Agencies because of their presence at the grassroots level.
” It’s exactly our mandate to respond to emergencies wherever they may be found.
” If there’s no coordination at the State level, it means that our responses will always be in shambles. We’ll not know how many people are affected, we’ll not know the exact type of response that we need to bring to the country”, Munyari explained.
The workshop was held in two categories; Stream one and Stream Two with the support of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), United Nations Children Education Fund, UNICEF, International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC and others.
Dominica Nwabufo
