Finance and the Public Service Minister Suggests Establishment of School of Government

Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke, has suggested the establishment of a School of Government in Jamaica to produce a high cadre of public-service officers and leaders.

Addressing the Management Institute for National Development (MIND) Regional Public Sector Leadership Development Conference 2024 opening ceremony, at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston on Wednesday (July 10), Dr. Clarke said this is with a view to ensuring sustained quality public-service delivery.

The Minister emphasised that this is critical to support the national public-.sector reformation apparatus.

“I think the time is apt for us to develop a School of Government in Jamaica. When we are finished with all of these reforms… you are going to need special qualifications to navigate. With the complex layers of laws, rules, regulations that have come from our ambitious multidimensional reform programme, we are going to need to specially train our own cadre of future public-service leaders to sustain it,” Dr. Clarke argued.

“The only way we are going to do it is if we have the dedicated infrastructure to train, to nurture, to develop and to produce public-service leaders who are acquainted with the complex layers of laws, procedures and regulations that govern public service delivery in Jamaica. I am going to go the full distance that we create a School of Government in Jamaica in a collaborative way… that can produce public-service leaders in perpetuity,” he added.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the MIND Advisory Board, Professor Lloyd Waller, said MIND is seeking to realign its programmes to address local and national interests.

“These are the issues and trends that we at MIND are also monitoring, trying to evaluate what the future of leadership will look like with a view of evaluating our own product offerings, our own courses, so that we can be able to better retrofit the public sector with the needs, skills, capacities and capabilities to be resilient workers, to be workers who are in sync with the world that we live in today. MIND is already on the way. MIND is already being retrofitted,” he said.

The two-day conference will feature presentations from experts from across the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

MIND will also host its Public Life Award for Leadership Excellence luncheon, where two awardees from Jamaica and the region will be recognised.

It celebrates individuals who demonstrate outstanding leadership in public service.