Day: February 28, 2023

Coastal cities across Africa experience extreme flood events annually, and 2022 was no exception. Coastal cities such as Durban, Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Abidjan, Mbeya have faced a run of severe – and oftentimes extreme– flood events. They substantially damaged houses, roads, communication infrastructure, motorways, and bridges. Furthermore, communities are at a high risk of water-borne diseases, particularly cholera, due to a lack of appropriate hygiene and sanitation in areas of displacement.

Due to the increase in extreme flood events, combined with compounding and cascading effects from other hazards such as COVID-19 and underlying societal vulnerabilities, African coastal cities find themselves in a precarious state.

Risk reduction strategies

In response to risks, several coastal cities have reinvigorated efforts to proactively address increasing disaster risks, by developing strategies and mechanisms to reduce potential impacts before the event occurs.

In various coastal cities policies, legislation, plans, and risk management agencies have advanced considerably. For example, in Nigeria, the Lagos Resilience Strategy and Climate Action Plan emphasized the assessment and mitigation of flood risk and strengthened Lagos’ resilience by enhancing citizen-to-government engagement.

Despite this much-needed development, efforts to manage flood impacts in Nigeria have leaned towards distributing relief materials and relocating flood victims to temporary shelters. Similar risk reduction strategies have also been implemented in other coastal cities. Yet, the focus is on response after the fact.

Priority four of the United Nations Sendai Framework emphasized the importance of building back better in recovery with improved assets and capacities with greater resilience and reduced vulnerabilities and the need to do so is urgent

Pathways to recovery

The unprecedented destruction caused by flood events in 2022 reconfirmed the need for multi-sector, inter-institutional, and multi-disciplinary approaches to managing flood risks in African coastal cities. As a result, stakeholders in disaster risk reduction must collaborate to develop a holistic and comprehensive recovery plan rather than only focusing on post-disaster relief efforts.

The starting point is for critical stakeholders in African countries to understand recovery not as a separate process that occurs only after a disaster, but as a vital process in risk reduction where there is understanding of the scope, utility, and capacities necessary for building back better.

Coastal cities need stakeholder and government support with robust short-and-long-term recovery plans throughout the recover process. In the short-term, it is essential to upgrade evacuation shelters, and review and update current policy and strategy documents that outline recovery plans. They should enhance government and community capacity to plan and respond to disasters.

Long-term actions must include strengthening hazard mapping, monitoring, and early warning systems. Such plans must prioritize designing resilient buildings, infrastructure and neighborhoods equipped to live with water and adapt to future conditions.

Science has a key part to play in improving understanding of the recovery process. This goes beyond the mere act of building back infrastructure, but also includes insights from governance to psychology to allow people to deal with losses and bounce back better.

Source: United Nations University

The head of a U.S. government program to fight AIDS, Dr. John Nkengasong, says that in its 20 years of existence the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has saved 25 million lives.

PEPFAR, set up in 2003 under the administration of former U.S. president George W. Bush, has transformed the trajectory of HIV/AIDS, Nkengasong told reporters Tuesday while visiting South Africa.

“Twenty-five million lives have been saved, 5.5 million children have been born free of HIV/AIDS, health systems have been strengthened in a remarkable way,” he said.

Nkengasong, who comes from Cameroon, said there was once a “sense of hopelessness” in Africa, the continent worst-hit by HIV/AIDS, but since then countries’ economies have increased and life expectancy has improved.

Some 95% of the total $110 billion spent through PEPFAR was spent on Africa as it bore the brunt of the disease, he said.

“Before PEPFAR only 50,000 people, 50,000 people on the continent of Africa who were infected, were on treatment, 50,000. Today over 20 million people are receiving life-saving anti-retroviral therapy.” he said.

Nkengasong said the infrastructure rolled out across Africa as part of the U.S. government program was also useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AIDS official said he was also “very positive” about the tools in the pipeline to combat HIV, including the roll out of pre-exposure prophylactics for HIV negative people that can be injected every three months and will stop the spread of new infections.

Source: Voice of America