14 July 2015: An €80-million funding package has been unveiled to support disaster risk management across Sub-Saharan Africa. The five-year ‘Building Disaster Resilience to Natural Hazards in Sub-Saharan African Regions, Countries and Communities’ programme was announced on the sidelines of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The European Union is helping to fund the programme, while the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) is one of the partners that will help to implement it.

Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Margareta Wahlström, UNISDR, stressed that the programme will help to reduce mortality and economic losses by improving preparedness, early warning systems and establishing systems for understanding how disaster losses are generated in order to avoid them in the future. The programme will also support Africa’s efforts to achieve the aims set out in the Sendai Framework for DRR, adopted in March 2015.

Roberto Ridolfi, EU, said that long-term risk management can save lives and livelihoods and set the foundation for sustainable development, and stressed the importance of a holistic approach to building resilience, based on accurate risk information and improved decision support systems. Hartwig Schafer, World Bank, acknowledged that disasters can “throw a country back five years” and erase economic gains made, at the national, local and individual levels.

The programme’s five areas of focus include: enhanced regional coordination and DRR monitoring; enhanced capacity of regional economic communities for coordination and planning, led by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR); improved capacity of regional climate centers for weather and climate services and real-time early warning systems; improved risk knowledge for future risk modeling, overseen by UNISDR; and enhanced financial strategies for informed decision making, run by the GFDRR.

From 1990 to 2012 in Africa, an average of 152 disasters was recorded per year, with the majority triggered by floods and storms. In 2014, over 6.8 million Africans were directly affected by 114 recorded disasters. [UNISDR Press Release: Africa disaster reduction fund is major new step] [UNISDR Press Release: Major EU boost for disaster risk management In Africa]