Digital Grants Coming for Healthcare Workers

The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Hon. Floyd Green, has said that healthcare workers and vulnerable groups in Southwestern St. Elizabeth may benefit from digital grants as a result of partnering with payment facilitator, WiPay.

The announcement was made during WiPay’s opening ceremony of its headquarters in New Kingston, yesterday (August 26).

The Minister said the selection of the recipients will be done through the office of the Member of Parliament and is scheduled to begin in September.

“I’m moving a little bit towards healthcare professionals because I do believe they’ve been doing tremendous work, and they’ve been stretched to the limit, especially those doing the vaccination campaigns, and depending on the amount, I would love to be able to give each of them a grant that they can use at any of the approved locations,” he stated.

Minister Green said 10 locations have been approved, which will share a QR code with WiPay that allows for each recipient to make a purchase using digital currency from the WiPay’s online platform.

“I pushed to have a wide array of locations where they can use the grant, so it may be that some of them want to use it for gas, some of them may want to use it [and] have a nice night with their family and some of them [may] want to use it to go to the pharmacy,” he disclosed.

Additionally, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WiPay Caribbean, Aldwyn Wayne, said “the grants need to be ubiquitous as cash would have been, but with a measure of control, so it’s not spent in places that it wasn’t meant to spend”.

Against that backdrop, he added that the company seeks to provide value to the under-represented in society and will strive to expand the grant initiative across other parishes, with the use of technology.

WiPay was founded in 2017 and has partnered with the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) in developing the E-Commerce National Delivery Solutions (ENDS) and with the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) in 2020 to produce the first cashless farmers’ market in the Caribbean.