PM Golding – Working on New Deal for Jamaica

Prime Minister Bruce Golding, has said that the Government was working on a new deal for the people of Jamaica that would bring communities out of poverty. He was speaking at the opening of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) Third Forum on Violence Prevention and Citizen Security, at the Jamaica Conference Centre on January 19.
The Prime Minister noted, “We are trying to get communities to manage their own affairs and resolve their own disputes before it becomes matters of the state…It is a new deal that we have to make with these communities.”
In his address, the Prime Minister thanked the IDB for its support of the Citizen Security and Justice Programme, which the Government is trying to sustain. The programme involves dispute resolution, leadership training and building community structures which the Prime Minister noted has worked “tremendously well in some communities.” He noted that by April the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) should have completed measuring the level of success of the programme in order to investigate the where adjustments can be made in implementation.
The Prime Minister also recalled an initiative within his office, “We have established within the Office of the Prime Minister a National Transformation Unit headed by the Reverend Al Miller, to assist in this process, to co-ordinate all the various initiatives that impact on the relationship with communities and the attitudes that communities have to authorities and the way that they relate to each other.”
The Prime Minister later signed a loan agreement for more than US$300M, most of which would go to support private sector liquidity and entrepreneurship.