A consultative meeting has commenced today April 3 in Accra by the National Development Planning Commission to assess the impact of previous disasters on communities in the country and to fashion out measures to make Ghana resilient to disasters.
The commission in their presentation indicated that relatively poor disaster prevention, response and rehabilitation mechanisms often triggers such unfortunate disasters; natural or man-made.
Dr Felix Addo-Yobo, a Coordinator at SDGs-ICC reiterated, stated major challenges for disaster management currently includes limited early warning systems, poor coordination among institutions, poor post-disaster recovery and rehabilitation mechanisms.
“We are all too aware of the various disasters in Ghana and the sub-region. We cannot wait for it to happen before we take action. We need to be prepared, proactive and make sure that we would be in the position to respond and recover from these disasters. We’ve been experiencing series of earth tremors, floods, fire disasters and so on lately and it’s a pointer that probably the bigger one is around the corner”
He also said their objective in the interim is to promote resilient urban development with strategies to factor security and disaster prevention into urban planning systems under the Sendai Framework.
The Sendai Framework is a 15-year, voluntary, non-binding agreement by the UN which recognizes that the State has the primary role to reduce disaster risk but that responsibility should be shared with other stakeholders including local government, the private sector and other stakeholders.
Dr Addo-Yobo further charged stakeholders to prepare plans to implement the Long-Term Development agenda.
He added, if Ghana as a country continues to underrate its investment in disaster reduction, monetary value will continue to shrink and human lives, properties would be lost.
The two-day forum was scheduled for April 3rd – 4th is organized by the National Development Planning Commission with support from, National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), Cities and Climate Change Project Steering Committee at University of Ghana’s Regional Institute for Population Studies and RIPS.
