A total of 23,986 Swiss francs (22,379 US dollars/ 16,340 euro) has been allocated from the Federation's Disaster Relief Emergency Fund (DREF) to deploy 2 Regional Intervention Team (RIT) members to perform initial damage and need assessments and provide support to the National Societies of Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago due to the effects of the drought.
Summary: At the beginning of January 2010 several Caribbean countries began experiencing severe water shortages due to lack of rain, which affected the agricultural sector. The Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in Saint James, Barbados, issued drought alerts for the eastern Caribbean. In response a DREF was authorized to fund the deployment of two RIT, one specialized in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), and the other in food security and nutrition. The objective of the deployment was to carry out a comprehensive assessment in affected areas within the south-eastern Caribbean and Guyana from a WASH and food security perspective, outline recommendations and develop a plan of action to respond to the current situation to reduce future risk. Recommendations from the assessment focused on installing water tanks and rehabilitating wells in communities without storage capacity.
Since completion of the report the drought came to a precipitous end as rains have began to fall heavily on the eastern Caribbean, easing conditions considerably. In order to reduce risk to future drought recommendations related to water storage and well rehabilitation are being considered under the ECHO-funded regional disaster risk reduction project.
The major donors to the DREF are the Irish, Italian, Netherlands and Norwegian governments and ECHO. Details of all donors can be found on: http://www.ifrc.org/what/disasters/responding/drs/tools/dref/donors.asp