African countries should build their own capacity to be able to address disasters, Director of Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment at the African Union, Harsen Nyambe said.
A two-day validation workshop for the Second Africa Bi-Ennial Report on the Implementation of the Programme of Action for the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) in Africa is underway in Addis Ababa.
The workshop aimed to bring together all member states of AU to validate the Second Africa Bi-Ennial Report on disaster reduction.
The workshop is looking at validating bi-Ennial report review report, which we do every two years to assess how member states perform in addressing issues of disasters, he said.
From the report, we expected that members of states will now be able to provide more inputs that can be taken to ministers who will meet in November this year, he stressed.
“What we expected from the member states is more to build their own capacity to be able to address those disasters,” he said, adding but more importantly, we have launched the multi- hazard early warning system for disasters.
He also elaborated that each member state will have its own early warning system, because it is better to be able to warn people before disaster strikes.
“In that way, people can be better prepared and they can avoid casualties,” he added.
He said we are supporting member states in terms of development of policies, but we are also actually training them on how to handle disasters but more importantly, actually for early warning.
“We have got a situation room here in Addis at AU headquarters, and we have been bringing member states, representatives of member states and regional economy communities to be trained on how to operate that because that’s one thing that we feel can help a lot in terms of alleviating disasters,” he stated.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 was adopted at the Third UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015.
The aim of the Sendai Framework is to achieve the sustainable reduction of disaster risks and losses in lives, livelihoods, and health and in the economic among others by 2030.
Source: Ethiopian News Agency