By Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa
A hurricane has a name. Drought doesn’t. Perhaps that’s one reason we prepare so differently for each.
Every year around June, something shifts almost automatically across the Caribbean. We begin paying closer attention to the weather. Batteries and flashlights are checked. We stock canned food and water. We trim trees, clear drains and make sure important documents are somewhere safe. Preparing for hurricanes has become part of who we are.
Drought is different. It doesn’t arrive on one particular day. It doesn’t announce itself with dramatic headlines or hours of live television coverage. It simply arrives quietly, one dry week at a time. The rain comes a little less often. Rivers begin running lower. Farmers begin rationing water. One morning the tap doesn’t run.
By the time drought feels like a crisis, many people are already living through one.
That is why the warnings we’re hearing today matter.
The Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology has warned that the current El Niño is expected to continue into early 2027, bringing hotter temperatures and increasing the likelihood of prolonged drought across much of the region. After an unusually dry first half of the wet season, the outlook suggests that severe long-term drought conditions are becoming increasingly likely for Saint Lucia and several neighbouring islands.
For many of us, El Niño still sounds like something happening somewhere else.
In reality, it begins with unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean that alter weather patterns worldwide. Here in the Caribbean, that often means hotter temperatures, less rainfall and greater pressure on our already limited freshwater supplies.
It may begin thousands of kilometres away, but we experience it in our communities. I didn’t always think about drought this way. Then 2022 happened.
Like many Saint Lucians, I watched communities struggle through severe water shortages. At Helen’s Daughters, some of the women farmers we worked with went close to two weeks without a reliable water supply. Crops were being lost, and when crops disappear, so does income. Some women were travelling into remote areas to farm or collect water, introducing another consequence of drought that rarely enters the conversation: their personal safety.
With funding, we decided to do something practical. We partnered with local suppliers and contractors to purchase and install ten 1,000-gallon water tanks for women farmers experiencing water insecurity. Those tanks helped families continue farming, supported household water needs and reduced the need for some women to travel long distances in search of water. Our reporting from that year documents those ten installations.
At first, I thought buying the tanks would be the expensive part. I was wrong.
By the time everything was installed, Helen’s Daughters had spent EC$37 643.67 on those ten systems– an average of almost EC$3 800 per farmer.
The tanks themselves represented less than a third of that cost. Most of the money went into the plumbing, concrete slabs, transportation and installation required to make them usable. It sounds obvious once you say it. But it completely changed the way I thought about climate adaptation.
We are often very good at telling people what they should do.
Buy a tank. Harvest rainwater. Install irrigation. Prepare.
What we spend far less time talking about is what preparation actually costs. It is one thing to tell a farmer she should install a water tank. It is another when doing so costs several thousand dollars that he/she simply may not have. That, I realised, is a very different conversation.
Then, only a few months later, the conversation changed again.
After one of the driest periods many of us could remember, Saint Lucia experienced approximately ninety minutes of intense rainfall that caused an estimated EC$7 million in damage in the north of the island.
One moment we were trying to help farmers cope with too little water. The next, we were responding to communities dealing with far too much of it.
Looking back, I don’t think 2022 simply changed the weather. It changed how we worked.
Like many nonprofits, much of Helen’s Daughters’ funding is restricted. That means resources are often committed to specific programmes and activities. When disaster strikes, you cannot simply redirect funding because the need has suddenly changed.
Experiencing both drought and floods within the same year forced us to think differently. We realised that if climate shocks were becoming more frequent and less predictable, then we also had to become more flexible.
It is one of the reasons we established a small disaster response fund. We know it will never be enough to respond to every emergency, but it allows us to act while we seek additional support instead of waiting until funding arrives after the crisis has already taken hold.
That experience also left me asking a much bigger question. If this is becoming our new climate reality, are we preparing for it?
For decades, we have built systems and habits around hurricane preparedness. We understand the warnings. We know which agencies take the lead. We broadly know what we are expected to do before a storm arrives.
When it comes to drought, we are beginning that journey – but we are not there yet.
That isn’t a criticism. It is simply a recognition that our climate is changing faster than many of the systems and habits we developed for the climate we used to have.
And perhaps that conversation shouldn’t stop with governments. It belongs in our homes as well.
When we look for a house or apartment, we ask about the area. We ask about parking, bedrooms, security and internet. How many of us ask how much water the property can actually store? Does it have a water tank? Could the household cope if the water supply was interrupted for several days?
I certainly didn’t grow up thinking those were questions that should influence where someone lives. Increasingly, perhaps it should.
The same applies to businesses. How long could a restaurant continue operating? A salon? A school? An Airbnb?
These are no longer questions only farmers need to ask. They are questions about how we live in a changing Caribbean.
None of this suggests that every water interruption is caused by climate change. Ageing infrastructure, storage, maintenance and distribution all matter too. Climate change does not replace those challenges; it makes addressing them even more urgent.
Perhaps that is the biggest lesson I took away from 2022. Resilience isn’t only about how quickly we recover after disaster. It is also about how early we prepare before it arrives.
We already know how to prepare for hurricanes because we have spent generations learning how. Now we have to learn how to prepare for the disasters that arrive more quietly.
Because when the rain doesn’t come, what we are really protecting isn’t just our water supply. It is our food, our livelihoods, our safety, our dignity and, ultimately, our future.
Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa is the Founder and Executive Director of Helen’s Daughters, a Caribbean-based organisation advancing women in agriculture, food security, climate resilience, and social development. Under her leadership, Helen’s Daughters has grown into a regional movement supporting women farmers and community-based agricultural innovation across multiple Caribbean countries.
