East Africa: Legislative Assembly calls for disaster mitigation

The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) met in Arusha, Tanzania last week to discuss the use of disaster risk reduction as a tool towards achieving sustainable poverty reduction in the region at a meeting entitled 'Disaster risk reduction: An instrument for achieving the Millennium Development Goals'.

“We are living in a region that is prone to disasters, We had a scare in 2008 when we experienced a tsunami along the coast. We, as EALA, therefore see it fit to work with the United Nations to ensure that we are disaster-resilient” said East African Legislative Assembly's (EALA), Safina Kwekwe, attending the meeting.

“Let's have a personalized policy approach for different disasters. Let's look into why past disasters that we could have avoided happened, and why we have not been successful in mitigating regional disasters,” said Prof. Laban Ogallo, director of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) and one of the keynote speakers.