Stakeholders learn to use new tool to assess, monitor country’s vulnerabilities and resilience abilities |22 March 2017

Stakeholders from government, the private sector and NGOs are meeting for three days to understand and learn to use a new Vulnerability Resilience Country Profiling (VRC) policy tool to monitor and assess the country’s vulnerabilities and resilience abilities.

The training, organised by the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change in partnership with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) is taking place at the Berjaya Beau Vallon Bay and it is being led by a local consultant, Dr Gerard Adonis, as well as an associate expert in sustainable development from UNDESA, Sae Kajima.

The principal secretary in the Department of Energy and Climate Change Wills Agricole launched the training yesterday morning.

Addressing everyone present he said Seychelles in 2014, with support from EU ISLANDS project of the IOC, carried out a baseline study to identify our main vulnerabilities and also identify how the country could address some of these issues through policies and planning.

He said the VRCP is a tool for self-assessment and progress and seeks to strengthen the national human and institutional capacity in relation to data collection and management as well as analysis and usage of existing data while engaging a wide range of stakeholders as well as address and incorporate new national priorities.

The training aims to strengthen stakeholders’ capacity to monitor, assess progress made and in doing so increase our resilience.

The VRCP consists of an assessment of a country’s vulnerabilities and its capacity to cope with these vulnerabilities (resilience) as outlined in the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, the Samoa Pathway and national strategies.

Ms Kajima said implementing sustainable development would depend on robust regular review to help identify problems and exchange best practices.

She said the UNDESA is committed to help Seychelles strengthen its capacity to assess vulnerabilities and progress.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) programme manager for Seychelles Roland Alcindor said the UNDP’s association with the VRCP started way back in 2014 when Seychelles was selected as one of the island countries to undertake a vulnerability study in preparation for the Samoa workshop.

He noted that small island developing states (Sids) like Seychelles are very familiar with vulnerabilities and literature on Sids’ vulnerabilities abound while the thinking on resilience of Sids is more recent.

He noted that internationally there have been some major conferences, which provided the necessary platform for small islands like Seychelles to make international commitments to achieve sustainable development.

He said the areas of vulnerabilities usually focused on are social, economic and environmental but these need to be explored much further to include the more human side which forms part of our capacity to build our resilience.

Mr Alcindor went on to highlight other vulnerabilities which as a country we need to address such as social vulnerabilities like the drug problem which is threatening to wipe out a generation.

“When we talk about resilience how can we be resilient if we don’t have the human capacity to address the threats be it environmental, financial, social or man-made,” he said.

He stressed on the need for us to build our capacity to ensure we achieve sustainable development.

For his part Ambassador Jean-Claude Adrienne said the Department of Foreign Affairs is in the process of setting up an SDGs steering committee to serve as a national coordinating mechanism to better coordinate the work of all stakeholders.