CASTRIES, St Lucia: The fifth national workshop in a series being hosted by the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Secretariat and USAID-COTS, to train Member States in the use of a Disaster Risk Management Benchmarking Tool (B-Tool) opened in Basseterre, St Kitts, on Tuesday July 3.
The two-day workshop is being conducted as part of efforts to test drive the B-Tool and gather recommendations on how it can be tailored to secure buy-in at the national level. Attended by over 50 participants, the St Kitts and Nevis workshop has attracted the largest number of persons so far, since the series of workshops began.
During the Opening Ceremony, held at the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) headquarters, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of National Security, Astona Browne noted the importance of the workshop to the overall preparation of the country to reduce the impact of natural disasters.
Describing the event as a “critical exercise”, Browne said, “We are fully cognizant of the fact that our own national development efforts can be wiped out in a matter of hours by natural disasters. While we are unable to prevent these occurrences, we can minimize the risks by being prepared.”
Noting the purpose of the B-Tool as an instrument which is focused on providing a mechanism that will ensure the sustainability of development initiatives and infrastructure invested in St Kitts and Nevis, the Permanent Secretary urged participants to be fully engaged in the training exercise stating that the B-Tool is critical to capacity building efforts in national risk reduction. “Today’s exercise will not only engage our collective energies as we endeavour to develop a national B-tool implementation strategy, but will strengthen our commitment to disaster risk management.”
As small island states, the experiences of OECS countries continue to point to the fact that a collaborative approach to risk management and risk reduction is critical, especially as the lessons learnt have shown that comprehensive disaster reduction strategies and policies must consider pre-disaster risk reduction and post disaster recovery.
In his address to the Opening, OECS Secretariat Representative, David Popo, used the opportunity to provide an overview of the OECS Disaster Management Agenda and discussed the partnership with the USAID-COTS in reducing the vulnerability of Member States to disasters.
“We are extremely grateful to the USAID-COTS for continued collaboration with us in our efforts to achieve sustained growth through policy advice and interventions in our Member States,” Popo said.
Reiterating the importance of community involvement in risk reduction, Popo told participants that the B-Tool is meant to provide St Kitts and Nevis with opportunities to prioritize national programmes of activities, build support for allocation of resources to reduce risk, provide consistent information on the country’s readiness, stimulate action and seek funding from donor agencies for disaster risk reduction programmes.”
Acting National Disaster Co-ordinator, Goldwin Caines noted that the workshop is timely, as it will advance efforts of government and other agencies involved in the local disaster management machinery, to pursue positive plans to promote disaster management proficiently.
He called on participants to be “attentive, receptive and objective” stressing that disaster management planning is a key element of the national development programme.
“We must be cognizant of disasters”, he said, “so that we will be able to manage them long before they arrive.” |
