Juliet Jacob Ochenje
The Federal Government has reiterated the need for all development partners, including United Nation’s agencies providing humanitarian services in Nigeria, to be properly coordinated by the government in order to ensure efficiency and accountability.
This is just as the United Nations (UN) has promised a 2024 Intervention Budget to support Nigeria’s Humanitarian Trust Fund.
Making this known in Abuja on Thursday when the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), led by its Deputy Director Operations and Advocacy Division in West and Central Africa, from UN Headquarters, paid her in Abuja, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Dr. Betta Edu, said streamlining humanitarian interventions will make planning for 2024 based on priorities of Government easy to achieve.
She noted that the era of rendering duplicated humanitarian services and wasting minimal resources in the country was over.
“We must stop working in silos and pull together to see how we can effectively use the little resources available to solve humanitarian crises in 2024.
“The Nigerian government will henceforth take the lead in humanitarian situation reviews, using dashboards and implementation of operations in the country to provide a coordinated response and durable solutions to humanitarian challenges in the country,” Edu said.
She added, “We need to make joint decisions, Government must be on the driver’s seat, we don’t want to be informed and communicated but we must plan together and implement together that way we can hold each other accountable for what goes on in the field.
“The era of duplication of functions and services in the humanitarian space is over. We need to stop working in silo but integrate and coordinate among all the different development partners in Nigeria.”
