Accra, Oct. 3, GNA - Mr. Daouda Toure, Resident Coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said on Wednesday his outfit would undertake a special fundraising exercise to support the disaster flood victims in the Northern regions.

The fundraising, dubbed: the "FLASH FUND", would be launched before the end of the week to raise about US 50 million dollars towards providing logistics and other assistance to the over 8,000 families affected by the recent flood.

Mr. Toure said these when the UNDP presented assorted Information Technology equipment to the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) through the Inter-ministerial Task Force at the Castle in Accra. The equipment includes six Toshiba Laptop Computers, three Back-up solutions, four scanners, one A3 Printer, and three A4 printers. Others are a Desktop Server with back up solution, eight UPS and one high capacity server UPS. The rest are, seven mobile phones, three fax machines and three toners for printer/fax machines.

He said a total amount of US 100,000 dollars spent to procure the items the development of the human resources of the officers to enable them to use the equipment effectively.

He said the items should be used to speed up communication, process and manage an effective database for disaster management. Mrs. May Chinery Hesse, Chief Advisor to the President who received the items on behalf of government expressed gratitude to the UNDP and all the other development partners for the roles they played in the assessment of the disaster areas in the North recently. She said the items presented to NADMO would strengthen it to have a common database on disaster victims for fair distribution of relief items while equipping them with reliable information for early warning systems. She said government was all out to support the victims adding, "the floods had given us a good paradigm shift to provide a rather strategic development plan for the three Northern regions." Mrs. Chinery Hesse said government was not only focussing on the immediate relief but a total recovering plan and appealed to the people in the affected areas to support government in its endeavour to restore sanity.