The Lady Mayor of the Makeni City Council, Sunkari Kabba-Kamara and her Chief Administrator, William Alpha are in Brussels to attend a World Bank conference on managing disaster risk and the impacts of climate change with greater concentration on people and assets in urban areas.
This World Bank’s Resilient Cities Programme launched in December 2013, reflects the conceptual shift and aims to help cities adapt to a greater variety of changing conditions and withstand shocks while maintaining essential functions.
At the end of the week-long conference, which also saw the duo attend the European Development Day programme and the ACP conference, the team paid a courtesy call to the Sierra Leone Embassy and were warmly received by the Chargé d’Affairs/ Head of Chancery, Madam Florence N. Bangali on behalf of Ambassador Ibrahim Sorie who is unavoidably absent.
Madam Mayor and her CA, briefed the Embassy staff on the strides her administration is taking to ensure that by 2018, her city will become the pride city of Sierra Leone for other cities in the country to emulate. She said with the recent support of £2.1m (Two Million One Hundred Thousand Pounds Sterling) from DFID, they’ve now imported various equipment to effectively handle the issue of filth in the city.
The first elected woman Mayor of the Makeni City Council and the only woman Mayor currently in Sierra Leone, explained that the two major floods that engulfed her city in recent years has served as an eye-opener and are now determined to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster.
She highlighted the support her administration is rendering to economically empower the women and youth groups and the provision of basic learning materials to some of the school-going children in the Makeni municipality.
By Chernor Ojuku Sesay,
Head of Media & Public Affairs Dept.
Embassy of the Republic of Sierra Leone,
Kingdom of Belgium (Brussels) /EU.
