SDC Helping Communities Turn Data Into Action

For the Social Development Commission (SDC), collecting data in communities across Jamaica is not simply about producing statistics and reports but also empowering residents to use the information to help shape the development of the places they call home.

Through its Community Research and Development Planning Programme, the Commission works with residents to identify community resources and challenges, determine priorities and develop plans aimed at translating evidence into action.

Director of Research at the SDC, Denerine Allen, tells JIS News that community participation is central to the process, ensuring that development planning reflects the needs and experiences of residents.

“We’re trying to facilitate holistic planning and making sure that development and decision-making not just happens nationally or top-down, but bottom-up, including all the communities and the residents so that they have a voice and a say in what happens in their community,” she says.

The SDC gathers credible community-level data through several research activities, which inform the development of community profiles, asset maps and listings of organisations and institutions, among other outputs.

Information for the profiles is gathered through household surveys, broad community meetings, focus group discussions and existing secondary data on the communities.

The profiles provide detailed snapshots of communities, incorporating information on population, economic activities, social services and residents’ needs.

They also capture data relating to health, education, sanitation, housing, infrastructure, employment, skills, income generation, crime and public safety, environmental issues and development challenges.

At present, 722 of Jamaica’s 775 communities have a community profile, representing 93 per cent islandwide coverage.

Ms. Allen explains that residents are integral to gathering this information, with persons from within the respective communities recruited and trained to serve as data collectors.

“We identify those community persons in one of those broad community meetings, whether it’s sensitisation or a follow-up meeting, train them, and then deploy them as data collectors,” she explains.
Once the information has been collected, the SDC returns to the community to present and validate the findings.

“We go back to the community once the data is finished to validate, to share what we’ve gotten, and to make sure that they agree, because it’s their data. We want them to own it,” Ms. Allen states.

“It’s not SDC’s property. It’s really for the community to use. So, we want to make sure that they own it, they see that it actually is representative of the community, and so they’ll use it to plan and move forward,” she continues.

The information is then used to help residents examine their communities’ strengths, weaknesses and gaps and identify the issues they consider most important.

SDC Deputy Executive Director for Community Research, Development Planning and Programmes, Juanita Reid, explains that these priority issues inform the development of Community Priority Plans (CPPs), which outline proposed actions, timelines and partners that can be engaged to address identified needs.

“It’s action-orientated planning. It’s from data to action and to addressing the important priorities in the community. We move it from the paper to action to advocacy and to solving real issues that affect community members,” Ms. Reid states.

The process has resulted in several community projects moving towards implementation.

Ms. Allen says that during the last financial year, the SDC was covering 180 projects emerging from the community priority planning process, 89 of which are in implementation.

“That speaks to the use of the data, because all of those emerged from our CPP,” she states.

To help advance identified projects, the SDC works with communities to prepare proposals and connect them with potential funding sources.

Ms. Reid points out that the Commission maintains a funding guide with information on national and international funders and the types of initiatives for which they provide grants.

“Communities will ask us to assist them, and we’ll help them to complete project proposal forms, which we send off to various funders. Last year, through these many project proposals, we were able to access or get assistance for communities to address their issues in the sum of roughly over $404 million,” she informs.

Ms. Reid further notes that many of the projects address physical infrastructure needs, including the upgrading of community spaces and parks, adding classrooms to basic schools and constructing bus sheds.

For Ms. Allen, the objective is, ultimately, to ensure that the research leads to tangible improvements in communities.

“We’re not just doing this to say we have 722 community profiles, we have 607 Priority Plans, but we want to see meaningful change in the communities,” she says.

She emphasises that the approach is community-driven and action-oriented, describing the process as “evidence translated into community-led action”.