By Miriam Humbe
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) organized Expert Workshop to review and integrate Early Warning For All, draft of Country Disaster Risk Reduction Situational Analysis Report, National Disaster Risk
Reduction Strategy (2023-2030) and Action Plan (2024-2027).
The three days workshop, which started on September 2, 2024 in Abuja was a project that was being implemented across the seven Sahelien countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal under Sahel Resilient Project of the UNDP with sponsorship of the Government of Sweden.
The project’s key regional partners are the UNDP, African Union Commission (AUC), ECOWAS, UN-Habitat, UN-Women, Periperi -U- University of Stellenbosch and AGRMETH.
Declaring open the workshop, Director General of NEMA, Mrs Zubaida Umar emphasized that the management of disaster risks in contemporary period must be anchored on preparedness, prevention, mitigation, risk reduction and adaptation.
Umar said that: ‘This cannot be realized in our country without the full deployment strategic action plan that clearly assigns roles and responsibilities to implementing MDAs and other relevant stakeholders.”
She said in view of the paradigms shift, a review of NEMA’s existing plans and frameworks documents has also indicated the urgent need to produce a more comprehensive action plan for disaster risk management in Nigeria in consideration of new and emerg’ng hazards in the country.
Umar said that such plan would be aligned with the Sendai Framework and the African Program of Action (PoA) to increase disaster resilience and drive sustainable development.
She said: “It is on record that the current escalation of disaster events in form of conflicts, banditry and annual floods coupled with extreme weather events have triggered the compelling desire to develop the DRR Strategy and Action Plan for Nigeria”.
The NEMA boss, therefore urged participants to articulate practical and achievable disaster prevention strategies in the Action Plan being developed as she requested them to accord serious attention to the critical issues at stake while also sustaining “The tempo of synergy and collaboration to successfully develop this document for a holistic disaster risk management in Nigeria that outlive 2030, the post Sendai regime.”
Goodwill messages were separately delivered by representatives of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency Professor Vincent Weli, Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency Mrs Fashe-Adam, Federal Road Safety Corp DC Okolie FO and the National Space Research and Development Agency Prince Oyewumi.
The Director General, FCT Emergency Management Agency Engr Mohammed Abdulrahman applauded NEMA and partners for organizing the workshop and said the use to data in disaster management cannot be overemphasized.
The project consultant Professor Andrew Obafemi presented an overview of the workshop.
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