Stakeholders meet over perennial flood disaster in district assemblies

Stakeholders meet over perennial flood disaster in district assemblies The German Development Agency (GIZ) and Allianz Ghana are spearheading a project to develop insurance models for extreme climatic events in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA).

The project, dubbed: “Develop Insurability Project”, is aimed at helping the Municipalities to develop contingency plans that would help reduce the impacts of anticipated hazards and disasters, including flooding.

The three-year project, which started in 2018, is designed for implementation in three Municipalities in GAMA, including Ga West and Ga East Municipalities as well as the Accra Metropolitan Assembly.

As part of the project, GIZ and Allianz Ghana on Thursday organised a workshop for some actors in the three Municipalities and other relevant stakeholders, including Fire Service, National Disaster Management Authority (NADMO), and Budget officers among others.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency at the workshop, Dr. Benjamin Antwi-Boasiako, the Senior Project Manager for Allainz Climate Solutions in Munich, Germany, said the entire idea behind the “Develop Insurability Project” was to help Municipalities in Accra to better manage the annual flood risks.

He said the project was to assist in identifying how best to reduce the risk because no matter what was done, floods would happen anyway but the issue was how best the Municipalities could be assisted to recover through the means of insurance when the floods happen.

He said: “Allianz is one of the biggest Insurance Companies in the world and has operations in over seventy countries and with the company with such a big size, we feel that we have a responsibility toward the societies in which we operate.”

Mr Antwi-Boasiako said climate change had been a major global issue, Allianz had taken upon itself to help developing countries where natural disasters usually happens more often, to prepare for this emerging risk and that was why Allianz decided to partner with GIZ and work on this project in Ghana.

He said the Insurance Company was of the firm belief that the approach could contribute towards making societies more resilience to climate risk, where in the event of flood the company would assist the municipality to restore damage and affected infrastructure.

He said it was the goal of the project implementers that by December 2020, the Insurance policy would have been developed for the Municipalities as they had already undertaken some preliminary data gathering on the catchment areas.

Mr Matthias Range, the Head of the Project, said although the project did not have the tendency to mitigate the annual flood situations experienced in Accra, it would help to improve the waste management systems in the Municipalities.

He said although the two institutions were doing their part to mitigate the flood situation in GAMA, it is in the hand of everybody else to do their part towards reducing the losses that were usually associated with them.

He said the entire project was estimated to cost about four million Euros and that the GIZ was committed to implementing the project with their partner, Allianz to ensure that the Municipalities were secured.

Professor Martin Oteng-Ababio, the Head of Department of Geography and Resource Development of the University of Ghana, who is the Consultant to the project, said the last Disaster Management Plan the country developed was in 2010.

He said there was the need to regularly update the country’s Disaster Management Plan to ensure its viability in the changing phases of society especially in the Greater Accra Region.

He said it was a necessary factor to ensure that every Assembly developed a measure to deal with potential hazards, which had the tendency to prevent disasters experienced by the country continuously.

Prof Oteng-Ababio said the Disaster Management Plan developed by the country did not factor the individual Municipalities and their peculiar challenges but generalised solutions, adding that there was the need to develop a disaster management strategy specifically for every Municipality.

He said to curb the menace of open defecation in water bodies in GAMA, there was the need for Government to make public toilets freely accessible to all citizenry and that its management should be handed to the Assemblies.