Caribbean Corporate Investment for Resilience: Final Report

The initiative was driven by local stakeholders and applied systems thinking and human-centered design (HCD) methodologies. Initial initiative discovery and design phases took place from November 2020 to February 2021 and March - August 2021, respectively. These phases centered around systems sensing and co-design and uncovered three central areas for strengthening resilience to natural disasters: enhanced cross-sector coordination and communications during crisis response, broader use of business continuity planning for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, and strengthened supply chains of products and services. Collaborative brainstorming with CCIR stakeholders led to identifying a range of innovative solutions to address these challenge areas. The CCIR Coalition aimed to provide a platform for the private and public sectors in the region to act collectively towards disaster and climate resilience. By participating in the CCIR Coalition, coalition participants would have the opportunity to share and access knowledge, information, and skills, build and strengthen relationships, learn how to shift business and organizational practices, and explore opportunities for public-private coordination and collaboration. Implementation of the CCIR initiative followed three primary streams of work: developing the Coalition's governance design and backbone functions, activating and engaging Coalition membership, and piloting the resource tracker solution. The report serves to succinctly describe the work carried out and steps taken under these streams of work to hand over assets, capacities, and tools to partners and other local stakeholders in support of their continued efforts in the region. The CCIR Coalition focused on Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Grenadines, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad & Tobago. The original intention for developing a coalition was for GKI and local leads to co-design a coalition for mobilizing collective action, across sectors and nations in the Caribbean, by providing a platform to convene, coordinate, and collaborate around the shared goal of strengthening regional disaster resilience. Networks function most effectively with a designated backbone organization that has the legal structure and capacity to staff, support, and grow a coalition. The Caribbean Community's (CARICOM) regional intergovernmental Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) was originally identified as a backbone for the CCIR coalition during the discovery and design phases. However, by April 2022, it became apparent that CDEMA did not have the staffing capacity to take on the work required to coordinate a coalition of mainly private sector actors. In April 2022, GKI convened a small group of private and public sector stakeholders to form a Design Team, which aimed to identify an existing backbone organization or develop a new one. The Design Team consisted of eight members and represented seven Caribbean nations. The team's work focused on developing a coalition governance design and backbone functions, activating and engaging Coalition membership, and piloting the resource tracker solution. The CCIR initiative included a focus on learning, which is outlined in the final section of the report. The initiative also included a "Learning Story" that identifies key lessons associated with CCIR's learning questions as well as illustrative case stories. The report provides a summary of the work carried out and steps taken under the three primary streams of work to hand over assets, capacities, and tools to partners and other local stakeholders in support of their continued efforts in the region.