Time to invest in disaster-proof infrastructure
YESTERDAY Zimbabwe joined the world in commemorating the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction to promote a global culture of risk and disaster awareness.
The celebrations, which started in 1989, are held every October 13, to see how communities around the world are reducing their exposure to disasters and raising awareness about the importance of minimising the risks that they face.
Across the globe, lack of resilient infrastructure is exposing mankind to extreme weather conditions, resulting in millions being displaced when earthquakes, storms and floods, among other disasters, hit.
The 2019 edition, running under the theme, “Reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services”, continues as part of the “Sendai Seven” campaign, centred on the seven targets of the Sendai Framework.
This year will focus on Target (d) of the Sendai Framework: “Substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, among them health and education facilities, including through developing their resilience by 2030.”
In a statement to mark the day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted that: “Making infrastructure more climate-resilient can have a benefit-cost ratio of about six to one. For every dollar invested, six dollars can be saved. This means that investing in climate resilience creates jobs and saves money.”
Several months after tropical Cyclone Idai devastated Zimbabwe, getting back to normal is painfully slow for the thousands waiting in resettlement camps for reconstruction to get underway.
The disaster caused extensive damage worth an estimated US$622 million. Over 50 000 households were destroyed, directly affecting 270 000 people, including 60 000 who were displaced.
Rebuilding can be a long process because pledges take time to deliver as donors and Government seek to agree on priorities and disbursement mechanisms.
There is still a large gap between necessary funding for recovery and what has been pledged by the international community.
Going forward, it’s not only about reconstruction of infrastructure and homes for those displaced but the country needs to be wiser in learning from previous mistakes and make clear choices to either invest in risk reduction or resilient infrastructure.
Globally, sudden extreme weather disasters aggravated by climate change displace millions of people every year and create high economic costs.
According to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre about seven million people were displaced by extreme weather disasters in the first half of 2019 alone.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction also points out that there has been a dramatic rise of 151 percent in direct economic losses from climate-related disasters.
“In the period 1998-2017, disaster-hit countries reported direct economic losses of US$2,908 billion of which climate-related disasters accounted for US$2,245 billion or 77 percent of the total. In terms of occurrences, climate-related disasters also dominate the picture, accounting for 91 percent of all 7 255 major recorded events between 1998 and 2017.
“Floods, 43,4 percent, and storms, 28,2 percent, are the two most frequently occurring disasters. The greatest economic losses have been experienced in the United States (US$944,8 billion) and in China (US$492,2 billion),” said the UN office.
In Zimbabwe, the impact of natural disasters is being amplified by lack of care in how we build, and this have caused huge losses of life and assets in Chimanimani and surrounding areas affected by Cyclone Idai.
Taking lessons from the destruction caused by Cyclone Idai, it is imperative that great care is taken to ensure that schools and hospitals are built to last by ensuring that location and hazard-appropriate planning regulations and building codes are enforced.
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WE beseech you to shed light on the issue of democratic space and human rights in Zimbabwe. All civilised and honest people know that in order for one to rationally judge or measure someone or something you need a standard.
That standard must apply to all the things you intend to measure. For example, if you want to measure the level of democratisation in a country, you could adopt the following as standards a multi-party system, ease of registering a political party, can all parties hold rallies, is there a separation of powers, can citizens sue government, are positions in government accessible to all who can marshal sufficient support, do opposition parties have offices, etc.
Now Ambassador Nagy, if we are to use the aforementioned approach and measure the level of democracy in all the countries of the world, would your views on Zimbabwe hold water? How many of the countries in the world, that your government funds, praises
SINCE Independence Zimbabwe has been sending students for further studies abroad, and the country continues to do so amid reservations from some citizens, who decry the rationale of such an ambitious programme.
The issue of continued sending of students to the Diaspora through Government’s support, especially in the face of economic challenges that the Motherland is reeling under, remains as contentious as the essence of what constitutes education, particularly when acquisition of university degrees has become commonplace. Due to loss of confidence in the local higher education system, parents are sacrificing their hard-earned incomes to send their children abroad for studies. Indications on the ground, however, do not complement the number of higher degrees that the country boasts of.
There is a persistent gap between knowledge purportedly acquired through book learning, and the skills required to drive the economy for the common good of citizens.
Speaking at the official opening of the Local and International Benchmarking of the Zimbabwe Minimum Bodies of Knowledge and Skills Workshop at Midlands State University (MSU) on July 22, 2019, Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Minister Professor Amon Murwira pointed out that for the country’s education system to work, there was need to forge a balance between knowledge and skills.
Said the minister: “The results of our National Critical Skills Audit showed that although the national literacy rate is 94 percent, the national skills levels are at 38 percent. Remember: production of goods and services can only happen when there is both knowledge and skill. Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”
In May last year Prof Murwira revealed that Government had completed the National Skills Audit and crafting of the National Qualifications Framework (NFQ) with the view to overhaul curricula framework for universities, teachers’ colleges and polytechnics. The country last conducted a skills audit in 1984, whose recommendations have now been outdated and overtaken by developments, especially in technological terms.
Because of lack of constant audits in curricula, not only in tertiary institutions, but at primary and secondary levels as well, the
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Instead of sending our students abroad, it is lecturers and professors who should be sent as they are key components in the knowledge-skills matrix.
gap between knowledge and skills widened. The design and philosophy that the curricula hinged on was inherited from colonial governments, where emphasis was on the creation of employees and consumers of goods and services, and not creators.
The Education 3.0 design in effect all along was premised on teaching, research and community engagement, thus, the need to shift to Education 5.0 anchored on teaching, research, community engagement, innovation and industrialisation, inspired by a novel heritage-based philosophy envisioned to culminate in the creation of goods and services.
It is against this backdrop that the issue of sending Zimbabweans abroad may be scrutinised, possibly to give insights into other possibilities. It has been argued that Government and the corporate world should pool resources and continue on the trajectory of sending our students abroad, as this is anticipated to be effective in pulling our burdened economy out of the quagmire it is trapped in.
True, the country is saddled with a dearth in skilled personnel like surveyors, doctors, engineers and actuarial scientists, among others, whose skills may be honed in other countries. Take the example of China, which has in excess of 400 000 students abroad, is often cited in support of the need to send our young compatriots to the Diaspora.
Indeed, gentle citizen, fellow countryman and dear friend, it is true; we are incapacitated to offer all the necessary skills that our Motherland desperately needs. It may not be about lack of confidence in our education system; that also may be true, for we live in a global village where cultural interaction should be norm.
However, as valid as all that and more may be, it is my humble submission that a closer look at the parameters on the ground reveals that there is more than what meets the eye regarding scholarships in support of students studying at universities abroad when there are universities here.
The majority of our students go to South Africa, where they are known to outperform locals there, because of their industriousness and ingenuity, which ironically they do not acquire there. South African universities, Chinese universities, and, indeed, any other institutions of repute out there, are well-equipped, you may argue; and that also is a stubborn fact. But herein lies the crux of the matter: Why are our universities lagging behind?
Facts are obstinately stubborn, sure they are. The University of Zimbabwe, our flagship institution, has been in existence since 1952, and still uses obsolete equipment in most of its key faculties like Medicine, Engineering and Surveying.
It is befuddling why the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Zimbabwe (ICAZ) partners with the University of South Africa (Unisa) in the training of its members, instead of engaging UZ, the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), or Midlands State University (MSU).
A valid question perseveres: Do we really have confidence in our institutions? Unisa, unlike UZ or NUST, is a distance education institution, offering a wide range of courses across the globe with well-established infrastructure that meets the prevailing trends in higher and tertiary education.
So when did the rain start beating us? Our tertiary institutions need to be funded. Institutions like UZ, NUST and MSU should be able to take a leading role in self-sustainability, and there is nothing that can stop them.
The idea of having universities all over the place, churning out half-baked graduates who cannot tell six from nine, is a hard sell.
If resources are directed towards key areas where skills are lacking, it will go a long way in mitigating our problems. Priorities should be set right. And if truth be told, even our politicians do not seem to have faith in our institutions, as their children are conspicuous by their absence at them.
With 6 977 students graduating from the MSU alone, 989 of them with Master’s degrees this year in an economy that has lost more than 4 000 companies to closures since 2011, it may be stretching the imagination too far to assume that sending thousands of our learners abroad would mitigate our situation.
Because they are trained to work and not to produce, the majority of graduates from the country’s 20 universities are likely to become redundant because the employment space is shrinking.
After seeking opportunities created by others and failing to get them, they will be no better than high school graduates. There will be need for them to be “retested”. Such is the nature of bookish knowledge.
Yes, we have a critical shortage of surveyors, an issue that was raised as aggravating to our land audit, but if sending thousands of our countrymen abroad were a panacea, why do we still have the same problem?
If we should continue sending them, we need to know what happened to those that we sent there. It does not need a rocket scientist to hazard the answer; you cannot send a soldier to train with weapons that he/she will not use on the battlefield.
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