NEWS RELEASE: ICTA/CTO Forum ends with Strong calls for an ICT-driven Centralized Agency to Coordinate Disaster Management in Mauritius

Port Louis:  A centralized agency to gather data and disseminate information should be set up in Mauritius to manage disasters which may pose a risk to the small island state. The creation of the Agency is just one of a host of   recommendations   generated during the ICTA CTO Forum on the Use of ICTs for Effective Disaster Management  which closed today.

The Forum was organised by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority and the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation. This recommendation was welcomed by Honourable Asraf Ally Dulull, Minister of Communication and Information Technology who today said that the government has already been working on measures to come forward with a legislative framework to create a National Disaster Management Agency. As such the Forum’s other recommendations for using ICTs efficiently for effective disaster management will be fed into this framework.

The centralized agency as proposed by the Forum would rectify what delegates considered was a fault line in disaster management in Mauritius—namely the insufficient level of coordination between the different emergency service providers be they the police, fire services or Meteorological Services and specific government departments tasked with handling disasters.

More streamlined disaster management using ICTs would also require the input of   operators to ensure seamless communication during emergencies and restoration of networks for the provision of basic telecom services within four hours of a disaster striking the island.

One recommendation is the decentralized positioning of emergency services whilst another key feature required by operators would be the availability of a common distress number to enable mobile phone users to be alerted via cell broadcasts. These are disaster alerts that can be broadcast in specific geo-locations. The advantage of cell broadcasts is that they can be sent to mobile users regardless of which networks they are connected to.  Cell broadcast capacity should be activated in all the three existing mobile networks.

The Forum called for a National Emergency ICT plan that would spell out what and how resources should be deployed by the   various stakeholders be it the regulator, the operators or civil society organisations before, during and after a disaster.

The ICTA CTO Forum brought together some 80 delegates across a cross section of stakeholders—government, the private sector, academia and NGOs working to empower communities at grassroots level.

During disasters emergency aid and back up can come across borders. ICT-driven disaster management across borders rests upon the Tampere Convention. The Convention provides for the relaxation of regulatory barriers to the movement of telecommunications equipment during emergencies and freer movement of nationals involved in relief efforts. The Forum urged that Mauritius becomes a signatory to this Convention if the country is to benefit from its provisions in the event of a disaster.

Forum delegates also felt that the deployment of ICTs in disaster management would serve no purpose if communities who are to benefit are not properly informed and more crucially involved in the decision-making process. The buy-in of communities vulnerable to disasters would also mean that ICTs contribute to sustainable disaster management projects.

5 March 2009