Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has unveiled a new strategy for 2025, centred on disaster risk financing and insurance uptake to prevent the recurrence of last year’s catastrophic floods, which claimed hundreds of lives and properties.
According to the agency, the shift is not just about managing disasters after they strike but mitigating financial exposure and ensuring faster recovery through risk transfer mechanisms.
At a high-level national workshop on disaster risk financing held in Abuja, NEMA’s Director General, Mrs Zubaida Umar, outlined the agency’s new approach, describing it as a “paradigm shift” driven by necessity.
“The growing intensity and rate of occurrence of disasters in Nigeria have become quite significant and alarming,” she said. “This has escalated the risk profile and humanitarian dashboard of the country.”
Mrs Umar pointed out that the new initiative was informed by the 2024 disaster experience, which saw 217 local government areas across 34 states inundated.
A total of 1,373,699 people were affected, 740,734 displaced, and 321 lives lost, leaving 2,854 people injured, wiping out thousands of hectares of farmland.
“Given the dwindling resources for disaster recovery and the competing demands on government, it has become imperative for NEMA to explore risk financing options that will guarantee early recovery and business continuity,” Umar noted.
Risk transfer mechanisms, such as insurance, are now at the forefront of NEMA’s disaster preparedness plan.
The agency has partnered with the African Reinsurance Corporation (Africa Re), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and other development actors to bring disaster risk financing into the mainstream of Nigeria’s emergency management framework.
“By transferring risk, individuals, businesses, and governments can reduce their financial exposure to disasters,” she explained. “Risk transfer guarantees the availability of resources for early recovery and building back better in line with the Nigeria National Disaster Recovery Plan and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.”
Still, the NEMA boss acknowledged significant hurdles, including low insurance penetration and prohibitive premium costs, especially in low-income communities.
“In many developing countries, including Nigeria, the uptake of insurance and other risk transfer mechanisms is limited,” she said. “This can be due to a lack of awareness or because insurance premiums are simply beyond the reach of many.”
To address these barriers, NEMA is offering the insurance sector access to its detailed damage and loss assessment reports, including historical disaster data.
“We are always ready to avail the insurance industry of our damage and loss assessment reports, including historic data on disaster losses across Nigeria, to help drive this laudable risk transfer initiative,” Umar pledged.
The workshop drew experts from government, academia, the insurance industry, disaster management, and the media, where Umar urged them to leverage their expertise to integrate insurance more deeply into Nigeria’s national disaster response strategy.
The stakes are high. Beyond natural disasters, Nigeria continues to grapple with complex humanitarian challenges, including insurgency, communal violence, and resource-driven conflicts, which compound the country’s vulnerability and stretch emergency response systems.
“Annual floods, windstorms, ocean surges, recurrent fire outbreaks, building collapses, boat mishaps, insurgency, and resource-based conflicts have compelled governments at all levels to invest huge resources in emergency relief and post-disaster recovery,” Umar said.
NEMA’s new focus on proactive risk financing could mark a turning point in the nation’s disaster resilience strategy as climate change and conflict continue to increase the frequency and severity of disasters.
