MONROVIA – Nimpson has joined 30 journalists from around Africa to attend a disaster risk meeting hosted by the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation under the theme Disaster Risk Reduction and Effective Early Warning Systems organized by the African Union of Broadcasting (AUB) and the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR).
The aim is to enhance broadcasters’ capacity to deliver timely and understandable Early Warnings and institutionalize DRR reporting in their program schedules to educate audiences about disaster risk management and disaster prevention.
The project has taken into consideration three main objectives, which include strengthening the capacity of African broadcast media organizations to fulfill their role in the early warning chain of communications in their countries, so they can deliver timely, accurate, and understandable early warning messages to wide audiences before, during and immediately after disasters.
Also to equip Radio and TV media outlets with the necessary disaster risk reduction and climate change skills, and knowledge about solutions, so they can disseminate disaster risk reduction solutions on a broad range of topics such as floods, food, and water security as well as educate people how to prepare to prevent natural hazards becoming disasters.
It is also intended to encourage inter-regional collaboration between news production and documentary units to cover disaster risk reduction and adaptation issues and facilitate news exchange within and between the regions so that a body of current, relevant programming content is available for syndication and sharing.
DRR for the past four years, more than 1,000 media practitioners from 33 African broadcasting organizations in 31 countries have been trained.
The AUB has been working with public broadcasters, however, this year has reached a consensus with partners to involve private media institutions and Nimpson is one of those benefiting from the decision.
As part of the program, she is one of the few journalists selected to produce a short documentary on early warnings after online training that led to her selection to participate in the summit.
Nimpson is a broadcast and print journalist. Senior reporter and presenter for Spoon Network, contributing writer at FrontPage Africa, a correspondent of the Voice of America, and a fellow of New Narratives.
Liberia is amongst five countries that do not have an Early Warning system in place to mitigate climate change disasters.