By: Momodou Justice Darboe
The National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) recently invited Map Action’s head of communications to The Gambia to help move forward the process of helping decision-makers and donors get a clear picture of the disaster landscape of the needs, risks, and solutions to gain that discussion about releasing early funding for disaster response.
Map Action is a UK-based humanitarian mapping and information management trouble-shooting charity for the humanitarian sector.
Speaking in an interview with this reporter at his office recently, the Executive Director of the NDMA, Mr. Sanna Dahaba, said: “I must thank the government of The Gambia for creating the enabling environment for MAP Action’s presence in this country. If you can fully recall, the two floods in 2020 were devastating and overwhelmed the capacity of data collectors. Map Action looked at our information system, our data generation system, and also data utilization system. This was why Map Action was embedded in the UNDAC team, who were here in 2022, to support us respond to our 2022 flood. As a result, the data that was generated in the country was able to inform a policy decision on those data. This is why data is important because it informs policy decisions. I really want to thank the government of The Gambia for creating that enabling environment and for all the support that they have been providing to the NDMA to achieve its mandate.”
The NDMA boss explained that he requested assistance from Map Action to send in their communication officer so that the two institutions could map out all the risk areas in the country to share them with the donors.
“It has to be evidence-based. Before donors help, they have to know you are in this particular situation. We took them to all our risk hotspots as evidence for fund mobilization from our donors,” said Mr. Dahaba. He added: “As an agency, there is a complete paradigm shift in terms of disaster management. We’re now adopting what, we call, anticipatory action. Before a disaster happens, we must make sure we strengthen preparedness to reduce the impact on the population. That is the new disaster management strategy that the NDMA embraced. This is why we invited Map Action’s communications officer to come and look at all our risk-prone areas so that we can share this information with donors.”
The Map Action’s head of communications Alex Mutef told this reporter that he was lucky to be taken to see the disaster hotspots in The Gambia to help in sourcing, calibrating, verifying, and packaging data to help decision-makers in making easier decisions to facilitate the release of funds for disaster response.
“We understand that it’s critical for agencies to be able to get these funds early in order to implement some of the early warning and anticipatory action programs. We want to support that process as a charity and to provide mapping and data support as might be necessary,” he explained.
He pointed out that releasing funding late for humanitarian support is one of the challenges many agencies face.
“Before I had the chance to meet the beautiful team here at NDMA, mapping colleagues werehere in 2022 together with the UNDAC team and they were invited here to NDMA, providing mapping support during flood response, capacity building with GIS and ICT officers here at the NDMA. Their work was to support the executive director and his team in capturing the key data at the mapping end to support decision-making and give decision-makers a clearer picture of what needs are, what the risk is, what the situation is, and what potential mitigating solutions are there,” recalled Mr. Mutef.
