Leadership abilities, skills and knowledge in building disaster resilience and response

Abstract

Leadership is essential to building resilience in disaster management and response. Authors assessed the abilities, skills and knowledge of leadership in critical national institutions in Ghana in relation to disaster resilience modalities and emergency response. Authors also determined if there is correlation between the slow integration of disaster risk reduction modalities into national developmental agendas and leadership capacity. This study consisted of literature and documentary review. Authors used purposive sampling to identify subject institutions that had indicated their willingness to participate in Semi-structured Key Informant Interview.  The result shows there is a paucity of research on the role of leadership in disaster and emergency intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) vis-à-vis the integration of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) into national agenda. The current national preparedness level is pedestrian. More needs to be done to build the resilience of the population by first building the capacities of leaderships in DRR. The integration of DRR into development policy is slow in SSA because leadership lacks operational capacity. This has led to confusion about what DRR is. Therefore it is concluded that leadership capacity needs to be strengthened through continual professional development and formal education in order to build disaster resilience and improve response.

Keywords: Resilience, leadership, disaster and emergency response, sub-sahara Africa, hyogo framework, millennium development goals, disaster risk reduction, Ghana