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Citing the dwindling fortune of government funding of agencies and the need to scale up the funding of Metrological activities in the country, the Nigeria Metrological Service Agency (NIMET) has harped on the need for private sector investment in the subsector.
The Director General of NIMET, Professor Mansur Matazu, who made the call during the first French-Nigeria meteorological seminar and business meeting, noted that the cost of conducting meteorological business is also increasing amidst staff attrition due to inadequate remuneration and many others.
According to him “Government funding of meteorological activities such as instrumentation, new technologies, equipment, welfare, communication, and data exchange are grossly inadequate hence it is imperative to embrace and explore that Public Private Partnership.
Prof Matazu stated that in line with the mandate of the agency, NIMET had been promoting and implementing activities in support of national socio-economic development across all sectors of the economy as well as develop various products and services that are reliable, accurate, timely and actionable.
“They include Seasonal Climate Prediction (SCP), an Early Warning tool, which highlights vital weather and climate information that may affect socio-economic activities in air, land, and water transportation, agriculture, water resources, disaster management and mitigation, health, tourism, sports, power and energy. Other products include the marine inshore and offshore forecasts, public weather forecasts, Impact-based weather forecast, Heavy rainfall forecasts and many more.”
He stressed that to sustain delivery of this product and services amidst economic situation, there is need for the adoption of available credible Public Private Partnerships and Engagements that will provide innovative and cost-effective technological solutions that will proffer ease of doing business for maximum impacts
The NIMET DG said, “We need to open up more partnerships, there is a concept in the World Meteorological Organization that is called meteorological enterprise, government and the private sector must work together in terms of weather monitoring as well as providing weather services for improved sustainability as well as livelihood in Africa.”
He said that countries including, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda among other partners in collaboration with this companies are coming together under the PPP approach to see how companies can collaborate with the public sector for improve service delivery.
The Acting Director General, Ghana Eric Asuman Meteorological Agency, pointed out that meteorological agencies have a lot of responsibilities as various sector of the economy depend on the weather and climate services hence the need to work hard and improve on the services in their operations especially in these part of the world where resources are hard to come by and working with the private sector with the resources and capacity will enable the fill the gaps that they face in improving service delivery.
Representative of the French government said France has a leading position on climate change since the Paris agreement saying they are trying to integrate in all their policies actions to mitigate climate change
He said the seminar was in response to a partnership request saying the benefit will be to the Nigeria government as well as other stakeholders.
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