The African Risk Capacity (ARC) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen resilience in the region through disaster risk management and financing frameworks.
ARC Director-General Mohamed Beavogui and SADC Executive Secretary Stergomena L. Tax exchange copies of the MoU at the SADC Secretariat in Botswana.
Natural disaster risks in the SADC region include droughts, floods, tropical cyclones, storms, and epidemics.
The agreement is intended to help put in place proactive measures to reduce the negative impact of disasters and other vulnerability drivers.
Together, ARC and SADC will help to build regional disaster risk management and financing capacities, as well as mechanisms and tools for risk insurance facilities to address both humanitarian and infrastructure reconstruction and recovery needs.
“The partnership will enable us to systematically work with SADC to better profile disaster risks facing the region, strengthen existing response capacities and contingency plans, and offer sovereign insurance options to enable rapid action when natural catastrophes occur,” said ASG Mohamed Beavogui, the Director-General of African Risk Capacity.
The SADC already has a Disaster Reduction Strategy which recognises the need for partnerships and cooperation to combat the wide range of disaster hazards that threaten lives and livelihood of its population.
“We can now deliberately work together on issues of common interests and strengthening a comprehensive and integrated regional approach towards Disaster Risk Reduction and mitigation of all forms of hardships that occur as a result of increasing climate variability resulting in increasing incidences and severity of floods, droughts and cyclones in the SADC Region,” said Stergomena L. Tax, Executive Secretary for SADC.
Under the MoU, ARC and SADC will jointly work towards broadening disaster risk financing and integration into disaster risk policy and frameworks, as well as the exchange of data and information on climate early warning.
The parties also plan to improve the existing regional and national flood modelling and forecasting tools.
SADC is a Regional Economic Community (REC) established in 1992, and composed of 16 member states.
