A recent workshop held by the department of Humanitarian and Social Affairs of ECOWAS aimed at building the capacity of West African countries to disasters by the integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into development agendas and sectoral programmes in the sub-region.
Recommendations included the need to strengthen ECOWAS Commission and national platforms to integrate disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into their development policy; the need for ECOWAS to coordinate and ensure complementarity between national platforms at community, national and regional levels; the enhancement of the early warning mechanism of the sub-region to include disaster risk reduction indicators and address regional trans-boundary emerging risks.