 The St. Lucia Development Bank, SLDB, has been disbursing monies to the small business sector to help them mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. The financial support forms part of the government's economic recovery and resilience plan. When the government of St. Lucia launched the Economic Recovery and Resilience Plan in July 2020, special arrangements were made to repurpose the Climate Adaptation Financing Facility, the CAF, to include a loan grant sub-facility, their business recovery program, which aimed to assist micro-small and medium-sized businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as those battling unavoidable effects of climate change. $2.6 million US dollars remain available under the CAF to help businesses through the business recovery program and to continue its traditional support to businesses, farmers and home owners in building resilience to climate change. Keegan Myers operates a 4.5 acre farm in the hills of Babano. He specializes in organic produce. In the past year, Mother Nature has assaulted his business on numerous occasions. Climate change has been possibly the most difficult opponent that we've faced in the last couple of years. To combat climate change, I actually embarked on a project to build a climate-smart greenhouse. That was one thing that we did to really try to push the envelope in terms of developing higher yields and better productivity. So last year in particular, we experienced for the first part of the year an extreme drought and for a lot of the part of the year we had an overwhelming amount of torrential rain. With his yields destroyed and his savings drained, a vicious cycle of mitigating the effect of climate change may as approached the Sintuja Development Bank for funding under the CAF. They understood the plan that we were going with, that they understood the risks and understood what we had in terms of assets to basically back it up. So that process, it took a little time I'm assuming because it's a farm that has a different business model. So it took a little bit of finagling to get them to understand it. They did and once they did, I think it was a really quick turnaround at the end. Martin Martin operates Bamboo Springs, a natural unpurified water which is sold to hotels and households. With the tourism industry in a Komoto state due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his operations were severely impacted. Our revenue was about 60% due to COVID. The Sintuja Development Bank offers the CAF business recovery loans at a starting interest rate of 4.5% with a 15% grant component. I saw out of this and they're willing to give businesses like mine grants or loans to help them recover from the COVID. And I thought, hey look, since I'm in that procurement, I suit the criteria for applying for the loan I did. I didn't necessarily have all the time to sit down and constantly do my books and so forth. So to have an institution that actually understands and is willing to work with you, it can understand that the value that you bring and can actually bring value in terms of working with you to develop your application and business plan so that you can go ahead through to get a loan and not just, sorry, you don't have enough and shut you down and not give you the advice. That is profound to actually have that level of support. The CAF business recovery program received technical and financial support from the World Bank, the Climate Change Investment Funds and the European Union through the ACP-EU Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Program. From the Government Information Service, I'm Hermione Mark.