UNDP trains civil society, community leaders as first line disaster defenders.

This is the focus of a five-day workshop in Buea which started on Tuesday, June 16. The training which ends Saturday, June 20, is focused on disaster preparedness and disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, sustainable resilience and feedback channels. 

With floods, landslides and extreme weather hitting cities harder each year, the workshop forms part of a broader UNDP-backed push to build a network of community-level responders who can keep spreading life-saving information on disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation in their communities.

According to the UNDP Project Officer attached to the programme, Belong Bernard Jean Joel, the initiative builds on earlier work that mapped hazards and trained technical staff across four municipalities. 

The project's underlying theory is ensuring local people trust local people, rather than relying solely on government bulletins.

Trainees will become community relays carrying alert messages into neighbourhoods that official channels often struggle to reach.

The training is built to avoid long lectures, by combining interactive presentations, group work and local case studies to analyse real-life situation and practical exercises built around campaign messages. 

The participatory, inclusive, and practice-oriented is to ensure the participants can gain full mastery of the steps needed to educate their communities.

The workshop draws on a wide bench of facilitators, including UNDP, Cameroon's Directorate of Civil Protection, the Cameroon Red Cross, the National Meteorology Directorate, the National Observatory on Climate Change, NOCC, and sectoral ministries. 

The Paramount Chief of Buea, His Royal Majesty Esuke Endeley, highlighted the urgency of such a training by sounding the alarm on the recurring volcanic and weather-related hazards that have shaped life on the slopes of Mount Cameroon. 

Endeley identified flash floods, earthquakes, lava flows and volcanic explosions as the main threats confronting communities living on the mountain's flanks, drawing on his own memory of past disasters to underline the stakes.

The chief also revisited the mountain's violent history, recalling the 2000 eruption, when lava broke through and flowed “all the way down across the road” toward Bakingili, depositing debris and forcing villagers to flee, and the 1999 eruption, when roads were closed and the mountain area evacuated. 

He advocated the need for safe places to be set up to accommodate people and provide food when such mishaps happen in the future. 

“Lava and the volcano don't always follow one path, we must train our people, especially the young and the vulnerable, and so we are ready before the mountain speaks,” he hammered. 

The traditional ruler further stressed the importance of community-wide education on evacuation procedures, first aid, rationing food and water, and assisting pregnant women and children during emergencies as the best way forward. 

For the Buea Council, the workshop was a responds to a problem they have lived with for years. 

The Second Deputy Mayor of Buea Council, Edward Mosoko, told participants that the seminar is meant to harness a concerted effort so that residents are better prepared for the kind of catastrophe the mountain can bring, describing Buea as inherently disaster-prone because of its location.

Mosoko used the platform to renew calls for a more disciplined development that is more civic-minded about where and how people build, rather than constructing haphazardly in areas exposed to mudslides or directly on the natural paths that floodwater takes downhill. 

He acknowledged that a modern drainage system for the town would require significant investment, but said the council was already taking steps toward a modern water canalisation system.

His expectation for the more than 40 participants in each session was practical: that they return to their communities and pass on what they have learned, helping residents identify and avoid the town's most dangerous spots.

This article was first published in The Guardian Post No 3822 Friday, June 19, 2026