Regional Managers of the Ghana Red Cross Society have been trained on disaster management to update their knowledge, capacity and skills on current trends on the disaster front and how they can improve the quality of their response activities in that regard.

They were taken through an introduction to disaster preparedness, principles governing disaster preparedness, the new disaster risk cycle, needs assessment, the standard for a minimum response, climate change amongst others to enable them know the essence of putting themselves in readiness to respond to disasters.

The five-day training, which ended in Tamale over the weekend, was to give participants a prelude of training towards the implementation of the Ghana Red Cross Society's Disaster Risk Management Strategy, which sought to build household, community and national resilience towards disasters.

The Ghana Red Cross Society's Disaster Risk Management Strategy (2020 – 2024) adopted five strategic pillars in its approach to scaling responses to disasters: Disaster Risk Management Planning, Organisational Preparedness, Community Preparedness, Disaster Response and, Coordination and Advocacy.

The Ghana Red Cross Society, as a National Society, continues to respond regularly to natural hazards and human-induced disasters - the causes of which are widespread, yet, often predictable and preventable.

Disasters have, for some time now, been a part of the country's woes, with severe impact on the country's economy, lives and infrastructure.

Dr Kingsley Kojo Asare Pereko, a Lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, and Vice President of the Ghana Red Cross Society, who facilitated the training, was optimistic that the training would contribute to improved disaster management in the country.

Dr Pereko said the training had prepared the participants to take lead in disaster response in their respective regions, adding, "They will also be able to develop workable action plans to ensure that they are able to meet their targets of emergencies."

Mrs Catherine Adasu, Greater Accra Regional Manager of Ghana Red Cross Society said "I have learned a lot to enable me draw my activity plan for the year, and how I can execute it, how I can raise funds, what are the possibilities locally to raise funds, what are the synergies that we have to draw from other organisations, and what else can we do apart from our usual response to disasters."

She added that "So, our take home is that we are drifting away from owning responding to disasters to trying so much to do disaster risk reduction to build the capacity of community members to respond effectively to disasters."