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After South Africa’s battle with the record-breaking drought of 2015, Prof Andries Jordaan from our Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa(DiMTEC) saw room for improvement in dealing with this kind of disaster.
Drought impact
Commercial farmers who are usually net exporters of food crops and communal farmers who own the bulk of the country’s livestock, were all hit hard in 2015. Most of the latter had no resources to spare as the drought progressed. The concern about the drought’s impact on the country’s food production and availability resulted in a joint goal of preventing food scarcity during future droughts.
Prof Jordaan’s visit to the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the US, several years ago prepared him to better equip communities in South Africa to deal with drought situations. “I recognised that in spite of the impact DiMTEC has been able to make on disaster preparedness, a gap remained in disaster response in South Africa.”
Sharing knowledge
In August this year Prof Jordaan again visited the NDMC. This time he requested a few key players in South Africa’s agriculture and disaster response communities to join him. With him were Janse Rabie, head of Natural Resources at AgriSA, a nonprofit organisation that functions as an interface between the government and about 28 000 South Africa farmers, and Moses Musiwale Khangale, director of Fire Services for the South African Ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
The South African delegation met with and learnt from climatologists, geospatial technologists, and outreach and planning analysts.
Government’s anti-poverty strategy under spotlight
2009-02-17
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Ms Mastoera Sadan from the Office of the President, Kgalema Motlanthe, recently held an information session with academics from the University of the Free State (UFS) to facilitate discussion on the Draft Anti-Poverty Strategic Framework. The overall objective of this strategy is to eradicate poverty. At the centre of the fight against poverty is the creation of economic opportunities and enabling or empowering communities and individuals to access these opportunities. At the session were, from the left: Prof Gustav Visser (Interim Cluster Co-ordinator for Poverty Reduction), Ms Sadan (Senior Project Manager: Office of the President) and Prof Teuns Verschoor (Acting Rector: UFS).
Photo: Mangaliso Radebe |