African Union donates US$100 thousand to disaster management

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African Union donates US$100 thousand to disaster management

11:26 CAT | 31 Aug 2018

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The African Union on Thursday donated US$100,000 to support the efforts of the Mozambican government in preventing natural disasters and in providing relief for their victims.

Jacques Ndoumbe, the head of an AU mission visiting Mozambique to gather experience about natural disaster management, delivered the donation to the Minister of State Administration, Carmelita Namashalua.

Thanking Ndoumbe for the gesture, Namashalua said it indicated that the AU is following the successes and constraints in Mozambique’s efforts to prevent and manage disasters.

“We have the Disaster Fund, approved in 2017, to which the government allocates four million dollars annually”, she said. “This sum will be deposited in that fund”.

She told the AU delegation that the government is currently analysing the expected behaviour of the main river basins in the region, as the 2018-2019 rainy season approaches. The rainy season runs from October through to the following March.

Namashalua explained in detail Mozambique’s early warning system, and the mechanisms in place for rescuing and assisting victims, and for post-disaster reconstruction.

“In 2007, we had floods which affected over 100,000 families in the Zambezi Valley”, she recalled, “and this obliged the government to assess how to deal with such situations. As from then the national relief agency, the INGC (National Disaster Management Institute) was restructured to mitigate the impact of disasters on communities”.

Local disaster risk management committees were established, and provincial emergency operational committees, and efforts were made to build the capacity of communities to react to disaster.

“The current challenge is to equip the local committees, and this is not easy, due to the lack of financial resources”, said Namashalua.

Ndoumbe said he is returning to AU headquarters with a good impression. He believed that Mozambique is one of the African countries with the best record in managing disasters, and hoped that its experiences could be replicated elsewhere.

Source: AIM