The South-South zone of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on Wednesday advocated “train the trainers strategy” to ensure effective sensitisation of people on disaster management. The Zonal Co-ordinator, Mr Umesi Emenike, said in Port Harcourt that the strategy would make everybody a teacher for adequate sensitisation.

Emenike said that the agency organised a three-day training workshop to train the trainers and to strengthen community network on emergency management in the south-south region.

He said the workshop which aims to mitigate and even reduce  disasters is informed by the experiences we had in the last flooding incidents. According to Emenike, “what we have done is to invite those that we want to train that will now retrain people at the community level on community resilience and emergency response.We’re trying to strengthen our community network, so that when there are emergencies in the community, as first responder, they would have been well armed to know what to do and who to reach out to when such incidents occurred.”

“Naturally, in emergency management, we have almost everybody as stakeholders, but, there are institutional stakeholders we are trying to train; people like the road safety, red cross, the civil defence, NGO’s, fire service and the rest of them.

We’re emphasising a” teach back strategy,” so that at the end of day, when they go back to train those who are not here, whatever benefit that they are going to gain from this training will categorise down to those at the grassroots,’’ he added.

The co-ordinator called for cooperation of all stakeholders, saying that the vulnerability of the zone to disasters required everybody’s support.