NADMO urged to educate traders

Participants at a gender responsive and disaster management workshop in Koforidua has called on the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) to educate traders against cooking in markets since those practices could cause fire outbreaks. The participants made up of women drawn from organizations in Koforidua noted that the increasing rate at which traders had turned their stalls into kitchen was alarming and needed to be looked at to ensure that their actions did not affect others. The participants said cooking in markets was worrying considering the fact that those wooden structures were weak coupled with the materials stored in markets. They called on NADMO and the municipal assembly to institute a bye-law to that effect because several education and warning for those cooking in markets to put an end to it had not been heeded. The workshop was organized by ABANTU for Development, a non-governmental organization, and NADMO to promote gender responsive culture in climate change, risk management and disaster risk reduction. Mrs Hamida Harrison from ABANTU explained that if women were well-informed about the causes and the state of their vulnerability, they would be positioned to reduce disaster effects and the ramifications of climate change. She said because women were the main agents of socialization and spent greater time with children, especially when disaster occurred, it was prudent that they were educated on disaster risk reduction to give a knowledge based approach in disaster management. The Regional Director of the Women's Department, Ms Jane Kwapong, called on women to be interested in educative programmes for their own benefit and not to think of money always. She said it was sad that when women were invited to programmes to empower them on social issues, they first asked of the monetary reward that would be given to them for their time to be wasted. The Regional Coordinator of MADMO, Mr Alex Owusu Boakye, shared the views of the participants on cooking in markets and said market committees had been formed to intensify education on that issue. He said NADMO was serving as an advisor but very soon a law would be passed empower them to pull down structures on waterways and others that posed threats to the public.