The Soroptimist International Club of Jamaica has named respected disaster risk management expert Dr Barbara Carby as the 2024 recipient of its annual Stella Gregory award for excellence.

The award is presented annually to an outstanding woman, who has excelled in her chosen field and has contributed to national development.

Dr Carby is being recognised for her outstanding leadership in disaster risk management, including her work in hazard management programme development and evaluation, and building awareness for the importance of risk reduction from community through the national to the international level.  

The award was presented by club president Dawn Campbell during the charter anniversary luncheon and awards ceremony held on Saturday (February 15), at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel. 

Leighton McKnight, executive-in-residence at the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM) at the University of the West Indies (UWI), served as guest speaker at the event. 

Soroptimist International is a global volunteer movement for women in business, management, and the professions, who work together to transform the lives of women and girls. The Stella Gregory Award was inaugurated in 1976 to honour club founder, Stella Gregory, who introduced Soroptimist International as the first service club for business and professional women in Jamaica. 

Carby was most recently director of the Disaster Risk Reduction Centre at UWI, where she led the programme for the centre and acted as principal investigator for projects. Prior to that post, she served as director of hazard management in the Cayman Islands.

There, she established the National Office for Disaster Risk Management and the National All-Hazards Programme. She has also served as consultant in the Turks and Caicos Islands, developing standard operating procedures for that country’s National Emergency Operations Centre. In addition, she developed standard operating procedures for the National Emergency Operations Centre in Montserrat.

Carby is best known in Jamaica for her role as director-general for the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) with responsibility for all aspects of Jamaica’s disaster risk management. 

In that capacity, she introduced multi-hazard mapping, the use of hazard and risk maps to inform community development and the inclusion of mitigation programmes as part of projects.

She further extended the concept of use of hazard maps for development planning to the parish level.