About Us | Vision/Mission | Mandate | Units | Programme | News Update | Activities/Achievement | Contact Us | Staff |

BACKGROUND

Natural and man – made disasters are inevitable occurrences that have become part of the life experience of mankind. The catastrophic nature of disasters and the huge economic\life losses they carry, most especially in the weaker nations, made them a source of serious concern to the global community (Jinadu, 2007). Part of the global efforts at tackling the menace of disasters are the lunching of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction on the 22^nd December 1989 (through resolution 44/236 of the United Nations General Assembly) and the World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Kobe, Japan in January 2005. Particularly, the 2005 conference addressed the need to reduce vulnerabilities to risk and hazards by building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters. The Hyogo Framework for Action adopted at the Japan conference set the guidelines for the reduction of vulnerability to hazards and emphasized the mainstreaming of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) into everyday decision and development activities with a view to substantially reducing disaster related losses by 2015.

One of the key measures of DRR is capacity building through public education and awareness raising. Thus, nations across the world have adopted measures to build human capacity and community resilience through the mainstreaming of DRR into the education curriculum at different levels. In line with this global trend, the Nigerian government, through the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), has taken several initiatives to mainstream DRR into her education curriculum at the primary, secondary and the tertiary levels. One of such bold initiatives is the establishment of the Centre for Disaster Risk Management and Development Studies (CDRM&DS) at the Federal University of Technology, Minna.