Speaking on the need to protect vulnerable children during emergencies, Save the Children Country Director, Patrick Analo said natural disasters will always happen, but effort must be made to minimize it impact.
Analo was speaking on the first day of a-three-day workshop organized by Save the Children, Sierra Leone. The organization is training personnel from its key partner agency in disaster management, the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) with representatives from the Freetown City Council (FCC), National Fire Force and the Ministry of Social Welfare Gender and Children's Affairs.
Participants of the training are being trained skills on the organization's Child Safeguarding and Gender Policy in responding to Emergencies. This is to ensure that participants understand the essence of child safeguarding and gender in emergency response which enables to professionally cater for the need of people affected by disasters.
It will also ensure that the participants are able to observe Gender sensitivity during an emergency response, raise awareness on safeguarding issues with the schools and communities they operate; effectively use reporting tools and improve reporting of feedback and incidents in their monthly and quarterly reports.
"My expectation is that at the end of this training, all participants of the workshop are equipped with the skills that would help them when responding to any emergency situation so that the impact it has on vulnerable households, especially children," Patrick Analo said.
According to him, Save the Children is also working on a multi-year project called the Global Climate Fund to look at the impact of climate change, especially in coastal communities of Sierra Leone.
When responding to disasters, it is critical to have the required skills in other to get it right, especially when dealing with issues that have to do with minors in disasters and the abuse they face during those incidences. The training is important because it increases the capacity of the Agency and empowers the Agency to adequately respond to emergencies, one of the beneficiaries of the training, Mohamed L Bah, Director of Communications, National Disaster Management Agency told Concord Times.
Save the children has some disaster management in its portfolio, being that we are the leading Agency in disaster management, they always try to make sure they provide capacity building for us to enhance our capacity. Knowledge from the training will help staff know what to do when confronted with safety and disaster management issues, he said.
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Child safeguarding is key in Save the Children's safeguarding policies and practices. The organization adopts safeguarding practices to ensure that its employees, volunteers, partners, vendors and other representatives do not deliberately or unintentionally abuse children or adults in affected communities.
In an interview, Akim Abdul Sheriff, Program Operations Manager for Save the Children Sierra Leone told the press that when it comes to disasters, children are mostly affected. He said they are collaborating with NDMA to ensure that the Agency covers concerns of the children when responding to disasters.
When distributing relief items, sometimes we only think about adults, but children who also need the items did not get them. So we work with all these partners to ensure that children's concerns in emergence response are at the core of humanitarian interventions, he said, noting that the training will enable the staff know what to do to children and what they should not do to them in emergence response.
Established in the UK in 1919, Save the Children started operating in Sierra Lone in 1999 and has maintained it focus on seeking solutions to the challenges faced by children in the country through it development and humanitarian support.
The organization which is present in about 120 countries also works to improve the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities, as well as providing emergency aid in natural disasters, war, and other conflicts.
