Government Partners with Food for the Poor to Build More Social Houses

In its quest to deliver more social houses to needy Jamaicans, the Government has partnered with Food For the Poor (FFP) to build additional units.

Making the disclosure at the handover of a two-bedroom house in Berkshire, St. Catherine, on January 18, Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, said the organisation has the building supplies and the technology, as well as the expertise to construct the dwellings.

He said the New Social Housing Programme (NSHP) is “well run” with acceptable procedures, and both the administrative arm of the initiative and the building process have good systems.

“So, we feel confident that we can enter into a meaningful partnership with Food For the Poor. We have a very good beneficiary identification system, and there is an entire Government machinery that has been put in place to properly document persons who obtain the houses,” the Prime Minister said.

Mr. Holness noted that individuals are properly assessed before they can receive a social housing unit, and “anyone who gets a house is someone who is genuinely in need, because a very thorough social investigation would have been undertaken”.

The Prime Minister argued that those systems have impressed FFP for them to partner with the Government.

He also said a credible system is in place to ensure that land ownership is settled before government money is approved to build the houses, as “anything that is put down, or anything that we build, and put Government resources into it, we have to ensure the security of it”.

The NSHP operates under the Housing, Opportunity, Production and Employment Programme (HOPE), through the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation.

The initiative is geared at improving the housing condition of the country’s most needy population.