A recently released Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI) report has highlighted that Jamaica spent J$387 billion on varying social intervention programs over a 10-year period with no significant change in violence indicators and no evidence to suggest that they worked.
The report titled ‘Testing, Testing: Challenges to Measuring Social Programmes for At-Risk Youth’ makes the overall claim that such programs in the island have a very weak monitoring and evaluation mechanism and have no baseline studies against which their success can be judged.
The research looked at 10 social programs targeting at-risk youth between fiscal years 2007-2008 and 2017-2018.
Speaking at the launch of the report on May 18th, security expert Professor Anthony Clayton from the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, says the lack of results from the billions of dollars spent is a betrayal to the people the programs were meant to help. He added that the study is an indictment of these programs and a betrayal to taxpayers who finance them.
“If you don’t have baseline data, you have no idea as to whether your intervention has had any effect or not. And this is a terrible indictment; it’s a betrayal of the taxpayers who finance this. But even worse, it’s a betrayal of … all the people who are still in poverty, who are still suffering from lack of opportunity, who are still suffering from violence, who should have benefitted and did not do so because of the money being misallocated,” he asserted.
Professor Clayton said many of the persons involved in these programs are not inclined to admit that the initiatives have not worked because they “simply want to believe that their work is not in vain”. Additionally, he said it is clear that financial benefits are being gained through corruption and those running the program “do not want the money tap to be tied off”.
He argued that it is long overdue that Jamaica brings some proper scrutiny to this process and that an independent body charged with evaluating every social intervention program is established.
He further stated that the programs that are not working should be defunded as soon as possible and the money should be reallocated to the programs that can really make a difference in the lives of needy Jamaicans.
