Let's 'map' Jamaica's Diaspora to achieve growth

 Diane Abbott

The Government attempt to map the talent in the diaspora is a good thing. The question, however, is having identified these talents, what will the Jamaican Government do with it to better the country and its people at home and abroad?

I am pleased that the Jamaican Government has set up the "Mapping Jamaica's Diaspora" project. It is potentially a brilliant idea. I have long argued that Jamaica's overseas diaspora is its greatest untapped natural resource.

The project is being driven by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and they are working with the International Organisation for Migration.

Its aim is to identify, through an online survey, what skills the diaspora has, and what they can contribute to the development of Jamaica. The survey is also designed to shed some light on what those of us in the diaspora think are the main issues facing us in our country of settlement.

I have dutifully filled in the survey and will wait to see what happens.

But, in the meantime, I would humbly suggest that ministers consider how they can maximise the value of the survey.

First of all, it needs to be more widely promoted so that people know about it. I know of very few Jamaicans in the UK who have actually heard of it. Most members of the Jamaican diaspora are going to have to be guided to it. So it cannot just be a question of merely putting it up online.

The Jamaican Government should work with churches and other grass roots organisations in order to get them to rally their members to fill it in.

There are at least 650,000 people of Jamaican heritage living in the UK — many more if you count the second and third generations. Hundreds of thousands of those will be connected to one of the black-led churches. They should be the go-to partners for any serious survey of Jamaica's diaspora.

I assume that the Government has sent details of the survey to the many different Jamaican organisations out there, whether they are national or linked to a particular town.

These organisations will be particularly valuable in targeting middle-aged Jamaicans who do not naturally spend a lot of time online. Because there will be this group of Jamaicans who will not find the survey online, because they never go online, the survey must be supplemented by other forms of research and data collection.

The danger in a survey restricted to online users is that, with no other supporting activity, it will fall short in documenting the diaspora in a genuinely useful way.

The Jamaican Government should also organise market research-type "focus groups" in all the towns of cities of Britain where there are large Jamaican populations.

This would add qualitative information to the merely numerical. This would cost money. But I suspect that the International Organisation for Migration is not working on this project for free.

So the same international organisations that are paying for that work could also pay to employ marketing and other experts to do a really thorough survey of Jamaicans and their descendants in the UK.

Then, once the survey is completed, the question is what will the Jamaican Government do with the information?

Having identified these talents, what will the Jamaican Government do with it to better the country and its people at home and abroad?

They have said they want to use the mapping exercise to support the development of a logistics hub, by identifying men and women with maritime industry, logistics, shipping and engineering experience.

Government has also intimated that it wants to advance the creative industries, such as animation and developing mobile apps.

If Government has these specific goals, in terms of identifying skills and talents, maybe they should also be approaching professional organisations and universities, encouraging them to identify people of Jamaican origin or affiliation within their ranks.

Professionals of Jamaican origin who have applied for jobs in the public sector back in Jamaica have sometimes felt unwelcome.

It would be a shame for the Government to go to all this trouble to identify skilled Jamaicans overseas yet still continue to recruit expatriates who are not obviously of Jamaican origin. We wait and see.

But "Mapping Jamaica's Diaspora" is a great project and, with a little tweaking, can make an important contribution to Jamaica's economic development.

— Diane Abbott is the British Labour Party MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington www.dianeabbott.org.uk

August 03, 2014

Jamaica Observer

The independent Jamaican Diaspora

By Hugh Douse

THE word Diaspora gained prominence from its usage with regard to the scattered Jews. The term relates to the people who identify with the nation of their forebears, and still attach themselves through culture in a way that affects their world view, and subsequently, their identity.

The Jewish Diaspora was impactful enough to represent an offence to Hitler, his Nazis, and countless others who begrudged their wealth, talent and success. The events of the Holocaust is the by which all genocide is referenced. This nation has more influence and impact on the world than its size would suggest.

And so does Jamaica.

The truth of Jamaica is that our greatness, our influence and, indeed, our destiny is to, as our pledge states, play our part in advancing the welfare of the whole human race. We will have practised our greatness to phenomenal levels in many areas: the Arts, sports, academia, religion, entrepreneurship, and all the professions in-between.

Now that we are 51 we must confirm, build on and protect this legacy. We must plan not only for the next three or four years as we are wont to do. We must build for the next 15, 50 and 100 years. I am sure that the practice of working hard for a promised land that may never be entered by the present nation is a mindset embraced by the Jews and other civilisations whose legacies seem to have been secured.

So, alongside the necessary rituals which mark Emancipation and Independence, we must reframe our thinking of ourselves as a nation to include more of whom we call, Professor Nettleford style, the Jamaican Diaspora. With about 3 million Jamaicans within the Diasporas of the USA, The UK, Canada (including Maroon descendants at Nova Scotia), Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Cuba, Colombia, and all the continents and nations of the earth, it is time that the virtual, borderless nation of Jamaica begins to think of itself in larger terms.

There is nothing worse than a great person or nation “smalling up itself” to be accepted by those who he nor she sees as peers, or worse, as superiors. It is neither profitable nor sensible to be less than you are to meet the low expectations of those whose opinions we esteem over our own. I think we have done too much of that over the last 50 years.

This is why I am excited that the Earl Jarrett-led Jamaica National Building Society — through an initiative led by Paulette Simpson, senior manager, corporate affairs and public policy in the UK, and Dr O'Neal Mundle, lecturer at the UWI School of Education — have put on for the third year a Caribbean Cultural Awareness Camp for the children of the Jamaica Diaspora in the UK. The project engages a team of eight Jamaican facilitators, who, through the performing arts, administer an arts-based curriculum with the aim of leading the children, ages eight to 18, into a deeper sense of identity through the engagement of their heritage. Her Excellency Aloun N'dombet Assamba, Jamaican high commissioner to the UK and Jamaica Diaspora UK, led by Celia Grandison Markey are supportive partners without whom this project could not survive.

The amazing thing is that, at the end of this two-week intensive, the campers mount a full-length production in which they teach what they were taught to large audiences in London, Reading, Wales, and Birmingham. Their parents and grandparents who were born in Britain are, through this production, taught their own heritage by their own children. In this 65th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush which carried the first migrants to the UK, they have found clues for this great diasporic civilisation of six million that Jamaica has become.

Six million. Hmmmm.

Growing pains mean that we may have to go the road alone. Interpret that however you wish, but none of the world’s powerfully successful nations are without a period in their narratives when they walked the road alone. We must decide where this independence is going.

One thing’s for sure. It is good to be here. But we cannot stay here.

So in this year of celebration of our 175th anniversary of full freedom, may we remember and honour our ancestors, not just through monuments of words, but rather through deeds great and far-reaching. Let us create a new trajectory.

Up you mighty race. Accomplish.

hugh.douse@gmail.com

August 06, 2012

Jamaica Observer

Bahamas Blog International