Poverty Reduction Coordinating Unit to be established
February 24, 2012The Full Story
A Poverty Reduction Coordinating Unit is to be established as government places focus on ensuring social protection for the country’s most vulnerable.
This was disclosed by Director General of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), Dr. Gladstone Hutchinson on February 23, during hisreview of the country’s economic performance for the October to December 2011 quarter, at a media briefing at his Oxford Road offices in Kingston.
Dr. Hutchinson said Cabinet has approved the setting up of the unit, under the leadership of the PIOJ, with oversight by an Inter-Ministerial Crime Prevention and Community Renewal Committee, chaired by Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Portia Simpson Miller.
He disclosed that new entitywill afford the country a mechanism to ensure that social protection of vulnerable citizens is centre-stage in the reform and modernisation efforts of the economy underway. He said it will also provide a “coordinating hub” to streamline poverty programmes and initiatives going forward, and avoid ad hoc interventions.
The setting up of the unit is in keeping with the ‘Growth Inducement Strategy’, which Dr. Hutchinson stated, is designed to provide a “coherent and comprehensively structured package of strategies and initiatives to systematically attack binding structural constraints and achieve sustainable economic growth with social equity."
He said that given the need to prioritize public expenditure towards more pro-growth economic initiatives, the PIOJ has identified from the strategy, three priority programme themes for the 2012/13 – 2014/15 medium-term.
These are: asset mobilisation; climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction; and community renewal and empowerment.
Asset mobilisation projects, the PIOJ head explained, include initiatives aimed at mobilising idle or latently productive human, physical and financial assets in both the public and private sectors, and enabling greater efficiency in the use of these assets to support production.
Specific strategies include: reform of the process for the administration of estates of deceased persons (probate reform); accelerating initiatives to regularise and register titles; and increasing funding and enhancing institutional capacity and business advisory services to micro and small enterprises.
As it relates to climate change adaptation and disaster-risk reduction, Dr. Hutchinson said that this is critical to the medium-term economic programme. He said over the last decade, Jamaica has experienced at least one major hurricane or tropical storm per year, and since 2001, the cumulative impact of these events has been in the order of US$1.7 billion annually, averaging two per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is estimated that by 2025, the cost of these natural hazards for Jamaica could be 13.9 per cent of GDP.
He explained that the initiatives to address climate change will include infrastructure and civil works projects such as rebuilding and maintaining farm roads and other major roads; drainage redesign, reconstruction and maintenance; gully infrastructure repairs; and coastal/shoreline protection, which is critical for tourism investment.
The PIOJ head emphasised that these activities will strengthen the resilience of the built and natural environment, improve the efficiency of Jamaica’s internal logistics system and generate employment.
With respect to community renewal and empowerment, Dr. Hutchinson said that a programme has been developed on the premise that “security, justice and community economic well-being are pre-requisites for the sustainable development of Jamaica’s communities and for the country as a whole."
The programme will address the holistic empowerment, economic development and broadening of freedoms of and delivery of services to residents in volatile and vulnerable communities.
It will be implemented in three phases in 100 identified communities in the parishes of Kingston, St. Andrew, Clarendon, St. Catherine and St. James.
By Allan Brooks, JIS Senior Reporter