BSJ Facilitating Stakeholder Training to Ensure Building Code Compliance

The Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ) is working to strengthen the country’s disaster resilience by training more stakeholders to ensure compliance with updated building codes.

Building codes are standards and regulations referenced in the Building Act, 2018 and implemented through the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development.

Director of Standards at the BSJ, Julia Bonner Douett, informed during a recent Jamaica Information Service (JIS) ‘Think Tank’ that stakeholders are being trained through a partnership with the University of Technology (UTech) Jamaica under the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project (DVRP), being implemented by the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF).

“In the training at UTech now, more than 50 per cent of those trainees are from the Ministry of Local Government and its agencies. We are supporting the training, and then when the training is finished we are going to ask that persons in entities be retrained, and in that retraining we will be monitoring to ensure that these officers have the knowledge and the competences,” Mrs. Bonner Douett said.

The nine-month training programme commenced on October 30 with an intake of 25 participants at UTech, and covers several different codes detailed in the Building Act, 2018.

“Right now, they are doing the Fire Code, which is one of the three Codes being sponsored through the project here. There is the Small Residential Code and the Big Building Code, and the training will continue into the other smaller codes,” the Director said.

Mrs. Bonner Douett added that design construction can be considered by students at the secondary level as a viable career path and encourages those with the interest to get involved.

“It’s a new world, a new technology to get involved in. The BSJ has various committees that deal with these very specific things. The HEART/NSTA Trust [also] has training programmes and qualifications. There is smart technology now which is moving very fast. There’s AI (artificial intelligence) which is impacting everything we do. We encourage people to investigate, research and get involved,” she further stated.

Under the US$30-million World Bank-funded DVRP), the BSJ will continue to receive support as it works to update the national building codes.

The project, which commenced in 2016, is expected to conclude in May 2024.