Minister of State in the Office of the Prime Minister, the Hon. Myles Laroda introduced the new Disaster Risk Management Bill to be debated in the house of assembly. One of the main aims of the bill is to merge the National Emergency Management Agency and the Disaster Reconstruction Authority.
The Minister spoke on the new bill at the weekly press briefing held at the Office of the Prime Minister. He said, “what we also noticed in the past was that you had NEMA you had DRA. So you had overlapping institutions. You had people basically doing the same things and agencies not really talking to each other. And that’s not on the personal level its just there were too many silos. The new agency would be an agency that will be much more agile, that will be much more adaptive. Another important reason why we are going in this direction is that there is a lot of funding out there for small island developing states like The Bahamas to access and in order to access those funds you have to have a legislative regime.”
Laroda also said that there will be training and that the government is building a career path in disaster risk management for Bahamians.