Paynesville City – The Paynesville City’s Chief Resilience Officer, Ms. Bindu Brewer, has said that the 100 Resilience Cities (RC), a global network of 100 cities, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation based in New York, is working towards building Resilience Cities around the world, of which Paynesville City is a member. Throwing light on urban resilience, Ms. Brewer noted that is when a city can identify and withstand crisis, stress and shocks.
“We interviewed six communities in Paynesville to find out issues they are facing and have designed a Preliminary Resilience Assessment (PRA), which is a process that has been ongoing for about 10 months for the city. We have gathered information from various stakeholders, donor communities, the schools and individuals living and working in Paynesville to find out the strength and weaknesses in order to come up with strategy to improve the situation of the city resilience, so if there is any other outbreak, like Ebola for example, we will be ready for it. She stated that the PRA identified four priority areas: waste management, water problems in terms of flooding and providing safe drinking water, unemployment and skills creations for the youth and governance branding and data collection,” she said.
Touching on Paynesville City’s waste management program, she stated that PCC dumps her wastes at the Whein Town cite, which is managed by the Monrovia City Corporation. “If you drive through Paynesville, you will see that our city is clean and free of garbage. When you pass through Red-light which was considered a hotspot, the garbage has been removed, even though we had a little problem with the Marketing Association in cleaning after selling and utilizing collection fees from marketers to maintain and keep their market clean,” said PCC’s Resilience Officer.
She said under governance branding of the PRA, they are trying to change the mindset of the people of being patriotic to their country and assuming responsibility for public infrastructure. “For example, we dedicated the Paynesville Park, which was renovated by the Chinese and in the dedication speech, the Paynesville Mayor expressed disappointment in Paynesville residents, who had cut the basketball nets on both sides and sprayed graffiti on the benches. We had just renovated the property so that the youth could have somewhere as a recreational center and they came and damaged the property which was meant for everybody. This is the kind of mindset we are trying to work on in our strategy. We will try to educate our people to change their mindset in loving and owning our country,” she said
Lastly, explaining about the Global Resilience Summit held in Rotterdam, she said it is the global summit for the 100 resilience cities held periodically every year, where all the 100 resilience cities staff and Rockefeller Foundation Staff gather to discuss their 100 resilience cities plan. And Rotterdam, where the conference was held, is a water city just like Paynesville. And they toured around Rotterdam City, to see how they dealt with their water issues.
“We saw that they use their water as roads, where they build canals for boats to travel around the city; unlike us we allow our water and rainfall to be captured by swamps, because we have not started managing our water system yet. All of the 100 resilience cities gathered at the conference, to look at the similarities within member cities to see what we could learn from each other,” said Ms. Brewer.