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After a rigorous selection process by charity organisation Oxfam South Africa, the City of Johannesburg Disaster Management Centre has been invited to make a presentation of its programme at a global Disaster Risk Reduction platform in Geneva, Switzerland, next month.
This follows after months of nail-biting selection and vetting process of the centre's Training and Awareness Community Emergency Volunteer recruitment and training programme, which was selected for submission to Oxfam International.
The centre's programme was selected as one of the few initiatives for consideration to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
The centre was told via Oxfam on February 25 2019 that it has been selected as the Oxfam South African representative and one of the international nominees invited to make a presentation of its programme on the Global DRR platform in Geneva in May 2019 for final selection.
The centre collaborates and partners with several international and domestic organisations that share the City of Johannesburg's Safer City vision. One such organisation is Oxfam South Africa, which partnered with the centre's Training and Awareness Unit on its now ongoing Community Emergency Volunteer recruitment and training drives in high-risk prone informal settlements. These risks range from fires, flooding to areas exposed to sinkhole formations.
The collaboration was as a result of a call by Oxfam International to all its branches worldwide to submit successfully implemented local-authority initiatives of good practices in the area of disaster risk reduction.
The centre's initiative indeed represents an example of collaboration between civil society organisations, local authorities and communities. It further underscores how stakeholders can join forces in pursuit of disaster risk reduction strategies by conducting local risk profiling and establishing a community-based model for risk reduction that is fully adapted to that community and integrated into the disaster risk management strategy of a local authority.
