The Caribbean Self-Care toolkit: Skills to help you live from a place of wellness in times of Crisis and Disaster

The Caribbean Self-Care toolkit is an evolving collection of effective tools and links to other resources, to help individuals and mental health and psycho-social providers improve wellbeing in all the domains of wellness. It supports a personalised self-care plan to use those skills and strategies and practice new healthy habits to cope with times of stress and the effects of disasters, given the high risk for hazards and unpredictability of climate. Caribbean women feel the brunt of these impacts as primary care providers, heads of larger households and falling primarily in the lower income categories. However everyone feels the effects and it is harder for communities to recover if individuals do not have tools to meet their needs.

Natural hazards and climate change, and in fact life’s challenges in general, impact men and women differently for a number of reasons. These may include but are not limited to psychosocial, cultural and economic factors which impact their different roles in terms of individual and family responsibilities.

The UN Women Multi-Country Office (MCO) Caribbean commissioned studies on the Impact of Climate Change and Disaster Risk and Cost of Inaction under the EnGenDER Project to understand the differential impact and whether institutional gender biases exist. EnGenDER is funded by Global Affairs Canada and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office.

Data has confirmed that gender inequalities do exist as a result of the impact of climate related hazards. These inequalities are also evident in the psychological impact experienced by men and women across Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the aftermath of the Category 5+ Hurricanes, volcano eruptions and other disasters for example.

The Toolkit is packaged in a Trainer of Trainers (ToT) kit and a full wellness domains kit: