West Pokot County Multi-agency Committee has called for nearby camps affected by the Saturday landslide to be collapsed to ease coordination.
The Committee said Tamkal evacuation centre in Pokot Central Sub-county should be moved to Paroo, pointing out that the camp deemed unsafe following an assessment carried out by the Kenya Defence Forces.
The Members put the camps at Nyarkulian, Paroo and Parua, saying the three camps will ease in the coordination and distribution of humanitarian aids.
The Committee members, speaking yesterday during the meeting chaired by Pokot South Deputy County Commissioner (DCC), Fredrick Kimanga, at the County Commissioner’s Boardroom, called on the local leaders to assist in convincing those resisting the movement to safer sides to accept.
“There are people still staying in areas marked as dangerous for human habitation and resisting any evacuation. We call upon the local leaders, chiefs and village elders to assist in convincing them to move to safer areas,” said Kimanga.
They further called on the harmonization of the figures of the people affected, pointing out that figures provided by the County Disaster Management and the Red Cross are different.
They observed that the figure given by the County is much higher than that of the Red Cross, and directed the Red Cross to take lead in the Rapid Assessment process.
Dr. Philbert Murie, the County Director of Health, said the different figures by the two agencies had made the distribution of Humanitarian aid difficult as what they want is exact number of people affected.
“We found the number of people affected by the disaster from County Disaster Management to be much higher compared with that from Red Cross, making work difficult to plan on distribution of the aid,” said Murie.
He singled out Nyarkulian camp where according to the County Disaster Management, 400 households were seriously affected while 1,800 people displaced and for the Red Cross only 52 households were affected and 676 displaced.
The Health Director said the Committee need to be guided by the accurate and concrete data, and called on the Red Cross to provide actual data of the household affected and those displaced.
The Committee further operationalized multi-agency teams in every evacuation centre, where they will meet on daily basis and report to the county team.
Members said all cash donations by donors or well-wishers to be channelled to the county pay bill where the designated signatories to the linked account will report to the county multi-agency team for utilization.
By John Saina
