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.
Source: GNA