By Orville Williams
Some of Antigua and Barbuda’s foremost emergency response agencies will soon be better equipped to navigate such situations, through a four-day workshop on emergency equipment and logistics management.
The workshop, hosted by the World Food Programme (WFP) in collaboration with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and the National Office of Disaster Services (NODS), got underway at the Antigua Air Station in Coolidge yesterday and will run until Friday.
Personnel from the country’s Defence Force, Police Force, Fire Department and NODS will participate in the training, which is aimed at educating the first responders on how to set up large mobile storage units, warehouse and inventory management, along with doing needs assessments.
At the end of the workshop, according to the WFP, the participants should be better prepared to set up equipment that can provide relief to persons affected during times of disaster.
The WFP conducted similar training sessions in seven countries last year, bolstering the skillsets of more than 200 participants and, indirectly, many others within the respective territories.
Antigua and Barbuda is the second country to benefit from this training for the year, after St Vincent and the Grenadines, while Trinidad and Tobago will close out the WFP’s work in this arena for the year.
According to one of the facilitators for this ongoing workshop, Major Damain Bromley, one of the primary challenges the WFP has observed in its work is a lack of adequate resources – a problem his organisation is trying to address as best it can.
“The challenges that we find are right across the board [and] the lack of resources in each of the countries is usually one of the biggest challenges,” he said.
“What we try to do at the World Food Programme is ensure that at least the equipment is available within country, so [emergency personnel] can quickly respond.
“The large mobile storage units that we have are multifunctional; they can be used as warehouses … field hospitals … shelters, so if we develop persons with the skillsets to erect those, then certainly the capacity within the region will be strengthened,” he told Observer.
With the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season now underway, this workshop is certainly timely, as a number of the participants expressed.
In fact, the lessons learnt could even be required as soon as the coming days, with some weather systems already threatening the region, despite the expert predictions of a ‘near-normal’ season.
As the climate change crisis gets worse, those predictions could prove even harder to make, and require more intense preparation to deal with the potential disasters.
For those reasons, the WFP intends to continuously adjust its training programmes to best equip emergency response personnel to face the challenges of the day.
“The responses to [different] natural disasters are similar, because it is [simply] giving humanitarian aid wherever necessary. So, what we do is develop the training to suit the needs as we see the evolution; we make the changes as we go along,” Major Bromley explained.
“For this workshop [for example], instead of doing only equipment training, we have introduced the warehouse management, inventory management [and] needs assessment. So, the participants – certainly those who are doing this training for the second time – will get greater knowledge in disaster preparedness.”
The World Food Programme is an international organisation within the United Nations – the world’s largest from a humanitarian standpoint – that provides food assistance and emergency support to countries and territories across the globe.
The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, meanwhile, is a regional inter-governmental agency that focuses on disaster management in the Caribbean Community (Caricom).
