By Anselma Aimable
Caribbean Net News St Lucia Correspondent
Email: anselmea@caribbeannetnews.com

CASTRIES, St Lucia: The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Secretariat and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has embarked on the development of a Disaster Benchmarking Tool (B-Tool) for the Caribbean. Senior government and private sector officials will receive relevant information in the use of B-Tool.

The B-Tool is a self-administered instrument which helps governments and national agencies to evaluate the adequacy of current disaster risk management tools, list best practice recommendations and assess their country's overall readiness and capability to deal with the risk of disaster.

The USAID and the OECS will use this critical session to advance the usefulness and benefits of the B-Tool in an effort to gather high-level support for and national endorsement of the tool.

The St Lucia leg of the Caribbean exposure will begin on June 28, - 29, 2007. The first half-day of the workshop will be a policy session to sensitize permanent secretaries, chairpersons of the national disaster committees and emergency service officials of St Lucia to the B- Tool. Following the half-day session with policy makers, the workshop will introduce the tool to another twenty-five participants, these persons will represent the National Disaster Office, Government offices, Utility Companies, private sector agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs.)

The St Lucia workshop is the fourth in a series of workshops being hosted by the USAID and the OECS Secretariat. The first three workshops were held in St Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica in September 2006. Similar to the previous workshops, the St Lucia session is being conducted as part of efforts to test-drive the B-Tool and gather recommendations on how it could be made more nationally relevant.

The OECS and USAID reiterate that their joint effort is built on a foundation of trusted collaboration and mutual commitment to measurably reduce the risk profile of the Member States of the OECS for natural disasters.

The two organizations anticipate that the training session in St Lucia will provide the country with an improved ability to benchmark its natural disaster risk. The workshop is being championed by Dawn French - Director of the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO.)