It was November 2017 and I had spent another hectic and eventful day working on the world’s most severe humanitarian crises as UNDP’s Early Recovery Programme Coordinator in north-east Nigeria.

Even in this era of social media and digital technology, the tools most often used to assess disasters are…paper and pencils. With luck and at least a few months, the understandable part of those handwritten questionnaires is converted in some sort of file that, only very rarely, is put together and analyzed on time to inform recovery programs.

Six months after two of the most powerful hurricanes recorded over the Atlantic wreaked havoc in the Caribbean, women and men in island countries like Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, British Virgin Islands and St. Maarten are working around the clock to build back better, with another hurricane season only four months away. In the immediate hurricane aftermath, governments requested the UN Development Programme (UNDP)’s technical support to recover, while boosting climate resilience.