KINGSTON, Jamaica (JIS) — Human population issues in Jamaica will be the focus of the Population Planning for Development in Jamaica Conference slated for January 25 to 27 at the Jamaica Conference Centre, in downtown Kingston.

Themed: ‘Theory, Practice and Policy for the Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda’, the event will open at 9:00am, with keynote speaker being former Prime Minister of Jamaica, Edward Seaga.

Co-chair of the conference organising committee, Dr Godfrey St Bernard, stated that the conference will feature plenary sessions, panel discussions and presentations from experts in various fields, including statisticians, demographers, sociologists, economists, philosophers, gerontologists and lawyers.

“The conference will focus primarily on human population activities and examine how these characteristics are related to prospective development agendas as they are set in the context of Jamaican society,” he added.

He noted that a key issue to be raised is the matter of statistical inputs and to what extent they are relevant to the development process in Jamaica.

Topics to be discussed include: labour issues in the Jamaican population; demographic data and implications for population policy in Jamaica; ageing and living conditions of the elderly in Jamaica; socio-demographic phenomena and their implications for education and learning in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean; and poverty and social inequality.

“This is primarily a country conference with focus on human population issues and putting them centre stage in the development process because for some time, they have been placed on the back burner and being invisible, so the general idea is that this conference will go from one country to the next,” the co-chair said.

He pointed out that the conference was held in Trinidad and Tobago last year and plans are afoot to take the next staging to Barbados.

“This particular conference is focusing on Jamaica, although we have made provisions for some of the presentations to be somewhat generic and make reference to ideas, experiences and research that may have been conducted in other jurisdictions within the Caribbean,” Dr St Bernard said.

“So, there will be some lessons for the Jamaican society on the basis of what some researchers might have done elsewhere, but most of the papers and presentations will focus on Jamaican population issues,” he added.

He pointed out that there will be concurrent panels of three to four presentations each, featuring contributed papers from a number of academics and other policy practitioners in Jamaica, Trinidad and Canada.

The round-table plenary, he noted, will feature key persons in the public sector in Jamaica who will speak to various related issues while examining linkages between human population and health.  

The conference is being spearheaded by the University of the West Indies, Mona in partnership with the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN), Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). It will last from 9:00am to 4:15pm each day.