Money woes hit local NGOs as COVID-19 wreaks economic havoc
Published:Sunday | May 17, 2020 | 8:51 AM
WHILE GOVERNMENTS battle COVID-19 to save lives, environmental NGOs, including those here in Jamaica, are waging a war of their own to protect natural resources as funding dries up, given the economic demands of the pandemic.
Suzanne Stanley, chief executive officer for the Kingston-based Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), said they are facing difficult times, but are prepared to continue their work.
“We are very concerned about the implications for JET. This (pandemic) will have implications for the bottom line in the future,” she said.
“Thankfully, to address this, we are in contact with our (existing) donors. All have been provided with updates on the projects and the activities to be delivered, and we are working together and are committed to ensuring that the projects are delivered once some normality can resume,” Stanley added.
Among their initiatives that are impacted is the Schools Environment Programme, a set of activities which have had to be pushed back to the next school year. As for their ‘Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica’ national campaign, which is supported by the Tourism Enhancement Fund, they are now two years in with one year remaining. When that third year of activities will begin is unclear at this time.
“The end of this phase actually coincided with the outbreak of COVID-19 in Jamaica. We are doing a kind of final reporting on that and are in discussions with the donor about when the next phase of the project will begin,” Stanley explained.
JET, like other entities across Jamaica, have also moved their operations online, as team members work from the comfort and security of their homes.
“We have been functioning very well online. We had our annual general meeting online. We have our weekly staff meetings online. And we had the foresight to build in remote access to our servers so we can draw on resources from the JET archives to do our work,” Stanley told The Gleaner.
“We are also constantly looking for new sources of funding and have seen opportunities, even during just the last six weeks. Of course, when we are looking at those funding opportunities, we have to look at the current options, given the current context of social distance, restrictions on public gatherings, etc.,” she added.
Work continues
Meanwhile, their advocacy work continues.
“We are a resilient organisation and we are remaining relevant. Our advocacy is still happening, albeit in a slightly different form. We have more direct interactions with agencies that we are targeting, and in terms of our environmental education, we are leaning more heavily on online education,” she said.
The Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency (STEA) is adopting similar measures as they move to weather the COVID-19 storm while also maintaining their advocacy work, certainly with respect to the Cockpit Country.
COVID-19, which has infected more than 3.5 million people and killed more than 240,000 globally, has dealt an especially devastating blow to tourism, which has been especially painful for STEA, which operates Cockpit Country Adventure Tours to support their work.
“Our visitors, for the most part, are from overseas. Our business is really driven by the foreigners who come to do hikes, caving, birdwatching and some customised tours. People want to experience the history and issues affecting the Cockpit Country, but anywhere from around the 10th of March, when the first COVID-19 case was identified in Jamaica, people were not coming anymore,” explained the agency’s executive director, Hugh Dixon.
“We had forward bookings for as far down as September, but we knew nobody was coming anywhere soon. It has curtailed our operations,” he added.
The saving grace, according to Dixon, is that they had for some five years now moved their operations online, absolving them of the burden of operational costs associated with physical office space.
“We have found that beneficial,” he said of the team which has been integral to the long lobby for the protection of the Cockpit Country that is home to several native species, including the Jamaican yellow snake, the Giant Swallowtail Butterfly, as well as the Maroons.
It is also a significant resource for Jamaica’s freshwater supplies, and in a context of a changing climate that presents a clear and immediate threat to water security.
It is against this background, Dixon said, that they are looking to adapt to new realities, even as they seek to finalise an Environmental Foundation of Jamaica-funded project to build a new trail inside the Cockpit Country, as part of a sustainable tourism agenda for the area.
“When it comes to COVID-19, we are faced with uncertainty on where the focus will be going forward. One is how will we operate and what will be our priorities going forward. We are meeting virtually to find out what that will mean for us as an organisation and in some ways, taking the lead to influence it,” he added.