Stakeholder engagement crucial to respond to natural disasters

 

Engagement between stakeholders is crucial to ensuring that each community within each island is in a better position to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.
 
This was one of the views that was expressed by the Director General of the Barbados Red Cross, Edmond Bradshaw in an interview with The Barbados Advocate recently.
 
He stated that in the beginning stages, many of the agencies in the region would have concentrated on strengthening their own capacities first and foremost, but once this was achieved, they then placed their focus on how they can work with the other partner agencies and international federations to assist their communities with disaster management.
 
“Let me say that basically many of the international federations and many of the agencies in this region particularly in the initial stages of set-up would have concentrated very much on their own development. But what we have tried to forge in the last decade  is a situation in which we are able to work better together and what the focus is now is one in which in trying to make communities themselves more resilient.”
 
Bradshaw said that regional associate organizations keeping in regular contact with each other, especially in the period leading up to and following a natural disaster in any one or more of the islands helps them to know the specific areas that they need to concentrate on when it comes to training disaster response personnel and community groups. It also helps them with coordinating the type and amount of supplies that are needed and courses of action that have to be taken in order to respond effectively.
 
“We are able to better work through regional agencies like CDEMA and through national disaster offices of Government because the national disaster offices of Government also have units across communities and if we can develop relationships in which we can have people trained to react almost immediately when a disaster occurs and to be aware of what equipment, what processes, what logistics are necessary to do that, then you know, it would work better for all of us.”
 
The Red Cross Director General said that all of these things are imperative considering that a disaster can sometimes affect more than one island at the same time given our close proximity to one another.
 
“Beyond that, within our own individual countries, the aspect of being able to assist one another (because) you know many disasters do not just affect one country in the Caribbean, basically we are so close in terms of geographically positioning, that we can have a situation where three, four, five countries are severely impacted and we would like to know that we can better work together and this yearly exercise is to be able to bring people together at the levels of disaster offices, at the regional level through CDEMA and other bodies and at the Red Cross national society level to see how well they are doing in terms of coordination, in terms of cooperation – how well those things are working – and at the international level of course, the Federation then sees what major support is needed which it can draw upon internationally. So it is that that we are focused on to a greater extent.”

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