PROTECTION of the rights of the nation’s young will get a much-needed boost as the Government makes good on its promise of a funding hike for the Office of the Children’s Advocate (OCA) this financial year.

The agency has been granted an increased budgetary allocation set out in the 2011/2012 Estimates of Expenditure tabled Thursday in Parliament.

The OCA — a commission of Parliament created five years ago under the Child Care and Protection Act to defend the rights of Jamaica’s children — will see its coffers swell with the addition of just over $18 million.

This takes the OCA’s budget to $75.4 million, a significant increase on its approved allocation for 2010 of $57.2 million, and approximately $16.1 million more than the $59.3 million allocated late last year in the Government’s revised Estimates of Expenditure. This bump in spending seems intended to concretise Government’s announced plan to increase the staff complement at the resource-challenged OCA.

In fact, over half of the additional funding for the agency, some $44.2 million, is slated for employee compensation this financial year, a $6.8-million increase over the 2010/2011 budget allocation of $37.3 million.

In February, the Government announced it would be hiring additional staff at the OCA; a lawyer, two investigating officers, a counsellor/intake officer and a senior secretary.

Outgoing Children’s Advocate Mary Clarke told the Sunday Observer at that time that these additions would allow the office to do significantly more for the nation’s children.

Clarke — who is now on pre-retirement leave — said the two lawyers currently on staff have been swamped with the high volume of cases across the island and the addition of even one more lawyer would impact greatly on the office’s ability to represent children in court.

She said the office would also be particularly welcoming of the investigating officers and the counsellors.

“We find that a lot of people need counselling, and so we spend a lot of time doing that, but now that we will have someone dedicated to that, it will free us up to do other things,” she explained to the Observer in February.

Clarke also said she had expectations that the addition of two more persons to the OCA’s investigation unit would free the lawyers from administrative work and allow for more timely investigations as well as a reduction in the backlog of cases the office has been struggling to clear.

Efforts to contact the acting Children’s Advocate Dr Eileen Salmon for comment were unsuccessful, however, Clarke told the Sunday Observer that she was “deeply grateful to the Government” for increasing the size of the agency’s budget to cover the cost of the additional staff.

Also of note in the 2011/2012 budget estimates are increases in the OCA’s travel expenses and subsistence allocation, which will almost double, moving from $5.7 million to a little more than $10 million, while the agency will get $11.8 million, for the purchase of goods and services, up from its 2010/2011 allocation of $7.1 million.