Damage and Needs Assessment Workshop
Basseterre, St. Kitts, August 22, 2019 (ZIZ News): The National Emergency Management Agency and the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance are partnering to host a damage and needs assessment workshop at the NEMA headquarters’, conference room.
A representative of NEMA said that the purpose of the workshop is to expose 20 participants to the requirements, procedures and practices in the damage assessment process and develop a core group of individuals trained to conduct assessments.
Instructor for the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster assistance, Livingston Pemberton said in the event of a disaster these trained individuals will be relied upon to collect the necessary data that will be needed to assess the needs of the country.
He also stated that it is critically important for countries to have trained personnel to do damage and needs assessments.
“One of the thrust now is for one to be resilient and part of this resilience is to have trained persons, trained persons would then make you more efficient in that if you have to give an assessment your assessment would be accurate, it would be timely and it would allow for the proper response, it helps the government, it helps the donor agencies, it even help our regional partners to be able to respond and also it helps in planning because part of the response may mean you have to rehabilitate or you have to recover and these processes tend to take a little longer than others.”
The sessions run until august 23rd. They begin at 8:30 a.m. and end at 4:00 p.m.