The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) has expressed interest to work with the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet).
This was disclosed when a team from the UN body paid a courtesy visit to the NiMet headquarters on Friday
Speaking on the purpose of the visit, team leader and Head of Office for Nigeria, Trond Jensen said he was impressed by the analysis and the work that NiMet is doing that the purpose of the visit is to continue its advocacy efforts to enhance the urgency, efficiency, and quality of humanitarian response in the north Eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. Jensen said: “One of the things we want to do this year together with the government institutions that we are working with is to be better prepared for the rainy season this year”.
He noted that last year was a national disaster in terms of the extent and impact of the flooding, also in terms of the damage to infrastructure.
He emphasized that the desire of UN- OCHOA is to work more closely with NiMet.
” We want to work more closely with you in terms of understanding what might happen this year, compared to last year and how we can work better, working with you in terms of preparedness, in terms of anticipatory action where your input is actually critical for us to understand how the inclement weather would impact on the humanitarian work,” he said.
Responding the Director General of NiMet, Prof. Mansur Bako Matazu observed that both organisations have a common goal and the convergence of providing early warning for all.
Matazu explained that NiMet has achieved certain level of leadership role on the continent based on the provision of climate services from co-generation to effective dissemination and getting feedbacks within the value chain.
Based on this, the NiMet boss further said that NiMet provides daily weather forecast to Liberia, and Sierra Leone as part of the World Meteorological Organisation VCP programme which has been on for almost seven years to date.
He disclosed that ” We are also implementing the WMO SOFF project, we are peer reviewing Liberia and Burkina Faso, Liberia we are doing that alone but with Burkina Faso we are peering with Spanish Met Service. We also want to apply for the second stage to peer review one or two other African states,” he said.
Prof. Matazu said that by doing some of these projects, NiMet has gained experience to be able to do some of its own national mandate while partnering with some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
The team that went on a tour of some of NiMet’s facilities was told, “NiMet is flexible and willing to work with the UN body and assured, “If we get details of your target location and elements of interest, we can come up with some products specifically for your usage and we can get it relayed to you electronically or we can create a segment in our App, NiMet weather App that can be downloaded from the playstore.”
