Jamaica Social Protection Strategy.

The Jamaica Social Protection Strategy is a national strategy with a multi-sectoral approach. The Goal of the Strategy is to engender Effective Social Protection — a major Outcome of the Vision 2030 Jamaica — through a streamlined and collective interpretation of social protection, which will guide the approaches to be used, priorities for resource allocation, and practical interventions. Its objectives are: 1. To enhance the prospects for economic and social development of Jamaica through a structured approach to the provision of social protection interventions; 2. To provide the conceptual underpinning that will guide legislative and policy frameworks, resource mobilization, programming and service delivery, for social protection in the country; 3. To unite and orient the efforts of public and private actors and stakeholders in creating responsive programmes and initiatives for social protection, through the various types of interventions; 4. To ensure that vulnerable or disadvantaged population groups or individuals have recourse to a safety net, facilitating access to basic income security and social services.
Poverty reduction will be achieved through the Growth Inducement Strategy of the government, of which an integral feature, is continued single-digit inflation and low interest rates, both of which have positive anti-poverty impacts. Additionally, the focus placed on social risk management to cushion the impact of shocks will “not only stabilize income and consumption but is an investment in poverty reduction”. It is expected to reduce poverty in three ways: Reduce transitory poverty; Prevent the poor from falling deeper into poverty; and Provide an avenue out of poverty. It is also expected that as a result of greater information on and access to appropriate risk management instruments provided by both the government and the market, higher risk taking investments will be engaged in by the population, which should contribute to higher levels of economic growth.
The policies and programmes of industries such as Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing are not a part of SP but are also of concern to the sector because of the linkage between the agricultural industry (e.g. returns to labour, productivity and marketing etc.) and rural development and poverty.
The National Social Protection Committee (NSPC) will be the body responsible for development and coordination of the monitoring and evaluation plan and providing oversight for its implementation. The NSPC’s secretariat, namely the Social Protection and Gender Unit of the PIOJ, will have the mandate to critically analyze information from all the stakeholders, consolidate that information into comprehensive, integrated reports and provide timely feedback from the Committee to the implementing agencies. Thus, the implementing agencies will be responsible for (a) incorporating indicators, where they do not already exist, into existing administrative reports or management information systems; (b) ensuring that information is produced on a timely basis and providing information to the NSPC through its sub-committees (c) using information to monitor implementation of their SP activities and taking corrective actions or modifying activities based on findings. By giving the NSPC ultimate responsibility for monitoring, objectivity is guaranteed and similar standards for evaluating progress will be applied.At the feld level, monitoring will take place in a manner similar to the national level.