By Onwa Ekor
The Nigerian Red Cross Society (NRCS), Cross River Branch in collaboration with the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs as well as other emergency response partners, have rolled out strategies to combat issues of flooding in eight communities of Cross River.
The affected communities spread in two local government areas of Ikom and Abi in the State are; Okanankpasi, Ntaselle, Okuni and Agbaragba, as well as, Ediba, Itigidi, Adadama and Imabana.
The one-day stakeholders meeting held in Calabar, the Cross River capital, focused on strengthening flood preparedness, early warning dissemination and early action planning in line with the objectives of the Italian-funded flood resilience project.
National disaster management Coordinator of the Nigerian Red Cross Society, Timothy Yohana, informed that the concept of the project is regional-based and scales down to Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon and Lake Chad.
He added that in Nigeria, the Project extends to Borno, Gombe, Sokoto, Enugu, Lagos, Anambra, Niger, Bayelsa, Nassarawa, Sokoto and Cross River.
Yohana explained that the project seeks to sustain the provision of immediate life saving humanitarian support in situations of flood disaster while also improving support for communities to improved access to water sanitation, as well as the rehabilitation of livelihood services.
“Our focus is to strengthen the resilience of flood in affected communities as we are aware that there are communities that are prone to flood disaster in Cross River.
“We tackle all these through preparedness, migrations and climate adaptation while looking at extending these messages to schools, communities and other champions,” the National Disaster Management Coordinator, said.
On the funders of the project, Yohana disclosed that the International Federation of Red Cross are co-funders as the group gets the funding from the Italian government.
Earlier, the Cross River Branch Secretary of the Nigerian Red Cross Society, Joseph Eni, hinted that, “for us, what we do is that we select communities based on the report we get and the report is always verified before forwarding same to the International headquarter.”
Eni added: “Overtime, we have gotten reports, though not only from these two local government areas in Cross River, but when such reports are received, we look at the most affected and those communities that have high vulnerability level, that was how we arrived at Ikom and Abi local government areas, for immediate attention.”
The technical session which involved mapping key partners, channels and triggers, saw stakeholders brainstorming and seeking better ways to effectively implement the project for humanity sake.
