Education Minister Welcomes Jamaica Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey Findings

Minister of Education and Youth, Hon. Fayval Williams, has welcomed the findings of the Jamaica Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2022: Situation of Women and Children.

Addressing Friday’s (March 15) launch at the University of the West Indies Regional Headquarters in St. Andrew, Mrs. Williams said the data-rich report adds to other recently published studies on Jamaican students and the indicators and variables that may be having an impact on their educational outcomes.

“The MICS 2022 report affirms positives, such as the 94 per cent on-track score for children, ages two to four years, who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being. At the same time, it highlights areas that need to be addressed urgently, such as the out-of-school rate for children, ages three to five and 15 to 17, with boys being disproportionately affected,” she said.

Mrs. Williams explained that the Ministry supports 7,500 students with a transportation subsidy, “but that’s just a drop in the bucket and it’s an area that we would definitely love more budget support on”.

Regarding school meals, the Minister said lunch and breakfast are provided to 100,000 students on the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH).

In the upcoming 2024/25 fiscal year, Mrs. Williams said $7 billion will be allocated for the school-feeding programme.

She pointed out that school gardens are critical to supplementing lunch programmes, adding that $25 million is earmarked for that undertaking in the upcoming fiscal year.

Mrs. Williams also noted that the Ministry will be seeking to collect real-time attendance data by installing the Education Management Information System (EMIS) across schools.

At present, she said the Ministry receives attendance data at the end of the school year, making it difficult to take action at that time.

“We only have 190 school days in the year. So it’s important that our parents really take it seriously to have their children in school and make the sacrifice for them to be there,” Mrs. Williams emphasised.

The MICS was carried out by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) as part of the Global MICS Programme.

PIOJ Director General, Dr. Wayne Henry, said the Institute relies heavily on data in the development planning process and in tracking the country’s progress towards its national development goals.

“Jamaica’s previous MICSs were fielded in 2000, 2005 and 2011, making the 2022 MICS long overdue. Children are living in wide-ranging conditions and exposed to many factors that influence their life chances. It is, therefore, critical that as we strive towards developed country status, we continually assess the status of children as a development imperative. MICS is a valuable tool designed to do just that,” Dr. Henry stated.

Some 7,903 households were surveyed between April and August 2022, to include 5,213 women, ages 15 to 49 years, 1,483 children under five years old and 4,313 children, aged five to 17.

The Global MICS Programme was developed by UNICEF in the 1990s as an international multipurpose household survey programme to support countries in collecting internationally comparable data on a wide range of indicators about children and women.

The MICS measures key indicators that allow countries to generate data for use in policies, programmes, and national development plans, and to monitor progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other internationally agreed commitments.