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

Say a prayer for Jamaica this Christmas

One of the ways in which the global recession is beginning to impact disposable incomes of people in the Caribbean is the fact that governments throughout the region have sought, or will seek, to raise taxes. With three days to go before the last Christmas of the first decade of the 21st century, it may have been a little unusual to see parliamentarians in Port-of-Spain debating legislation as fundamental as the major reform to the country’s system of property taxation. One of the points about the proposed property tax is that it seeks to provide the Government with a substantial new revenue plank at a time when the country’s revenue base has been challenged by the sharp decline in earnings from the country’s energy sector. The fact is that the Government forecasts that it will earn $37.9 billion in revenue from all sources in the fiscal year October 2008 to September 2009. This is a 39 per cent decline in tax revenue from the year before.

Based on an assumption of an oil price of US$55 per barrel and a natural gas price of US$2.75 per million cubic feet, the Government predicts that total revenue for the current fiscal year will amount to $36.6 billion. But while the decision by the Government to proceed with the new property tax has led to a great deal of heat, T&T nationals should consider the situation in which our neighbours to the north find themselves. In Jamaica, the Minister of Finance last week tabled in their Parliament the third set of revenue-raising measures for their fiscal year which ends in April. The Jamaican economy has been devastated by the sharp decline in its three main sources of foreign earnings: taxes on its alumina and bauxite resources, revenue collected from tourists who visit the island, and money sent to Jamaicans by friends and family members living in the US, Canada and the UK.

Jamaica has also been impacted by years of living beyond its means—by spending significantly more than it collects—with budgets over the years being balanced only because the country has been able to borrow from international and local banks at ever-increasing interest rates. But with three credit rating agencies downgrading Jamaica’s foreign debt to levels that indicate that there is an expectation that the country will not be able to service its debts, there are few commercial banks that would be brave enough to lend Jamaica money—even if banks the world over did not face liquidity concerns. As a result of global downturn and its own lack of fiscal prudence over the last three decades, the country has been forced back into the arms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—with which Jamaica has had a fractious relationship.

In preparation for the new stand-by agreement with the IMF, the Jamaican Government has been placed in the invidious position of having to announce a punitive package of new and increased taxes a little more than a week before that country celebrates Christmas. Among the measures that were announced in the Jamaican Parliament to be implemented on January 1 were an increase in the general consumption tax (GCT) from 16.5 per cent to 17.5 per cent and an expansion in the tax base of the GCT to include many food items such as fresh fruit and vegetables, ground provisions, sugar, salt, flour and cooking oil. Jamaica’s Minister of Finance also announced increases in the taxes on electricity and gasoline. Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who made an unannounced visit to Port-of-Spain last Wednesday as the country seeks to divest its national air carrier, made it clear in a statement on Sunday that he has no choice but to raise taxes.

“I urge the Jamaican people to understand that our choices are extremely limited and there is no easy way out. Our current revenues cannot meet our required expenditures and we cannot continue to borrow our way into an even worse crisis,” said Mr Golding. While we say a prayer for our brothers and sisters in Jamaica, we also need to learn from them the dangers of living beyond our means.

22 Dec 2009

caribdaily

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International