GIZ engages three Assemblies over floods in Accra

By Lydia
Kukua Asamoah/Mohammed Abdulai, GNA

Accra, Oct 25, GNA – The Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Allianz Climate Solutions GmbH
(ACS) on Thursday engaged three district assemblies within the Greater Accra
Region to discuss and define their roles in adapting and mitigating the risk
involving the perennial Accra floods.

The Assemblies are; the Accra Metropolitan,
the Ga West, and the Ga East Municipal, who were engaged in a day’s workshop
that enabled officials to share their assemblies’ experiences in disaster risk
management strategy and implementation within the Greater Accra region.

The meeting also enabled the participants to
suggest ways of including; risk transfer in their strategies to take care of
residual risk, under the GIZ/Alliance Develop Insurability Project being
piloted in the three assemblies.

The Develop Insurability Project was aimed at
complementing the World Bank Greater Accra Resilient Integrated Development
(GARID) Programme being implemented in three out of the six municipalities
within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA).

The Project is jointly funded by the
Public-Private Partnership programme (develoPPP.de) on behalf of the German
Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and Allianz
Climate Solutions GmbH (ACS), which is part of the Allianz Group.

Mr Matthias Range, Team Leader, GIZ’s Develop
Insurability Project explained that the programme focused on creating the right
environments for local authorities to consider insurance as part of their
disaster management strategy for floods in the urban areas.

He said under the programme, the assemblies
would be assisted to identify their climate risks needs, and be encouraged to
strengthen climate resilience and sustainability by adopting the principles of
prevention, planning, preparing, responding and recovering, to address the risk
of flood, which was the main climate change impact within the Greater Accra
Region.

He said the municipalities were chosen because
they shared common water shed, a hydro-basin approach which allowed for much
better coordinated prevention and internalising related benefits.

Dr Elke Stumpf, the Team leader for Market
Oriented Agriculture Programme and Integrated Climate Risk Management at GIZ indicated
that implementing Integrated Climate Risk Management Approaches required
partnerships to make it more meaningful.

She therefore commended the Develop
Insurability Project for bringing stakeholders from both the public and private
sector to dialogue on how to integrate risk transfer approaches into existing
disaster risk management plans.

Dr Benjamin Antwi-Boasiako, Senior Project
Manager, Climate Advisory at Alliance Climate Solutions, said their interest in
the partnership was not specifically for financial gains, but to offer their
services and contributions towards climate risk management in the country.

The Develop Insurability is currently working
on preparing the grounds for implementing risk transfer solutions as part of an
integrated Disaster Risk Management approaches being implemented by GIZ GmbH
and Allianz Climate Solutions (ACS).

The event sought to introduce HKV Consultants,
a firm contracted by GIZ and Allianz to carry out a risk analysis on public
assets in selected municipalities in Accra as well as to gather and assess
stakeholder Data needs so that the necessary support could be given to enable
each stakeholder to be functional in the project.

The project would introduce the Municipal and
Metropolitan Assemblies specifically, to focus on creating the right
environment for local authorities to consider insurance for floods in the urban
areas.

It would significantly speed up reconstruction
through swift disbursement of claim pay-outs after an event, improve the
resilience of the assemblies and promote sustainable development.

GNA

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