Speaking at the Second Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Kenya today, Margareta Wahlström, a senior United Nations official, stressed that African countries should include disaster risk reduction in their national development plans, if efforts to reduce poverty are to succeed.
“We [governments] need to work through the private sector to learn how they manage risk reduction programmes and also as an avenue for raising the much-needed resources for mitigating natural disasters,” Ms Wahlström said.