Fourteen project leaders from eight community climate change and disaster risk projects in four Caribbean countries – Jamaica, British Virgin Islands, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Belize – recently got hands-on training with an online information system to help them better monitor and evaluate their projects. The projects which are being implemented under the Caribbean Disaster Risk Reduction Fund (CDRRF), aim to reduce risk and build community resilience to adapt to climate change and disasters. CDRRF is managed by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and supported with funding from the European Union and the Government of Canada.

“This training will enable us to have more timely input of reports and eventually consolidate data across all eight sub-projects,” said Claudia James, Project Manager for the CDRFF. “We really need to extract information that allows us to speak to the trends, challenges and successes of each project, and determine what the numbers are telling us. Then we can explore this data in more detail to get more qualitative results.”

During the training at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel in Kingston, all eight projects were represented by their project managers and data management officers. They were exposed to a weeklong Management Information System (MIS) session to help them improve monitoring and evaluation, reporting and communication of results across varied platforms.

The initiative, according to James, will make reporting and sharing of data more seamless. The recent Monitoring and Evaluation and Communications training follows last November’s Global Information System (GIS) Mapping sessions at which community groups were also introduced to community climate vulnerability assessments and the rapid Community Climate Vulnerability Assessment toolkit. Project participants have also benefited from training in communications and presentation of project data across varied platforms.

This approach is being taken to help build community resilience and support communities in addressing new and existing risks presented by natural hazards and climate change impacts.

This approach is being taken to help build community resilience and support communities in addressing new and existing risks presented by natural hazards and climate change impacts.

Projects being implemented across the four countries cover a diverse range of areas including: rehabilitation of emergency shelters; installation of early warning systems; business continuity planning training for small and medium-sized enterprises, training of farmers in climate-smart agricultural practices and financial management; support for the reactivation of at least one female farmer’s group; and safety-at-sea training for fisher folk.