OF all the progress Jamaica has made over the past 50 years — bouncing back from economic shocks to battling climate change and natural disasters — the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is most proud of the assistance it has provided in getting the country to reduce poverty levels to what is now a “50-year low”.

The historic achievement has been stated by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), an institution the UNDP helped to establish in 1984. The PIOJ was preceded by the National Planning Agency which was established in 1972, and before that, the Central Planning Unit that was created in 1955.

At a press conference last November, director general of the PIOJ Dr Wayne Henry reported that Jamaica’s poverty rate dipped to a low of 7.8 per cent in 2024, down from the previous record low of 8.2 per cent in the prior year.

At the same time, he noted that the number of Jamaicans facing extreme poverty was at 2.7 per cent — the same as in 2023 and, more importantly, the lowest level since 1989.

“We have played a big part in Jamaica’s poverty eradication programme,” UNDP’s Resident Representative in Jamaica Kishan Khoday told the Jamaica Observer on Friday as he outlined plans to mark the UNDP’s 50th year in Jamaica. UNDP first set up shop in Jamaica on January 26, 1976 and has been here since.

“Over the years and today [addressing], poverty eradication…and inequality is job number one for UNDP; it’s at the core of our mandate globally. When we started our UNDP office in Jamaica in 1976, extreme poverty rates was about 30 per cent — so about one out of every three Jamaicans was living in extreme poverty at that time,” added Khoday as he proudly underscored that the poverty rate has steadily declined to single digits today.

Asked whether Jamaica could be held up as a test case for other small island developing states (SIDS) when it comes to poverty reduction, Khoday said, “There has been a lot of good practices, both policy wise, in terms of institutions [and] in terms of the types of initiatives on the ground. There are a lot of good practices in Jamaica that I think are worthy of being embraced by other countries that the UNDP is currently practising in, and vice versa.”

Khoday further pointed to Jamaica’s cooperation with the African State of Rwanda to reduce inequality in the justice system, with the help of the UNDP.

“What we’re doing is bringing some good practices from Rwanda — which has put in place an excellent system of digitisation into its case management process — and we are bringing those lessons to Jamaica.

“Likewise, we’re bringing some of the good practices of Jamaica …on poverty reduction …on taking action on climate change [to other countries],” added Khoday who is now two years into his five-year term in Jamaica.

He argued that the heavy lifting started back in the 1970s with the initial cooperation between UNDP and the National Planning Agency, the aforementioned forerunner of the PIOJ.

Khoday said the focus at that time was on establishing the initial national development plans, combating poverty in terms of the basic needs of the population, income generation, and human capacity for entering the labour market for employment, among others.

The cooperation between the UNDP and the Jamaican Government also explored the basic inputs needed for farming such as access to water for rural communities, agricultural extension services — the whole gamut of services needed for a population to thrive.

“That was the focus in the early years of our work at UNDP here in Jamaica back in the 70s and into the 80s,” Khoday said.

“And then it started to take on more of what we would call a multidimensional lens to poverty. So beyond basic income and beyond some of those critical inputs it became a focus much more on some of the multidimensional features such as the environment, such as deprivation.

“So expanding access to participation and decision-making, expanding access to justice, and looking at other factors so that in more recent years we are addressing the challenge of inequality and how factors such as climate change tie in to poverty and inequality,” declared Khoday.

He told the Observer that the UNDP is aware that the gains made by Jamaica could be fragile, “so today and going forward, our cooperation is much more about how do you sustain these gains, how do you make those achievements more resilient.

“And also how do you factor in modernisation, the important role for digitisation, the challenges of informality, and rural versus urban divide.”

Khoday pointed out that, “Many challenges still remain. So while we’re proud of the cooperation and doing our small part in Jamaica, the people and the Government’s achievements over those 50 years, we’re very much focused on the ongoing challenges such as inequality and, going forward, those multidimensional factors.”

He argued that said climate change is now one of the biggest challenge facing SIDS such as Jamaica.

“The SIDS are really a segment of countries globally that are really at the front line of the climate crisis, but also I might say they are at the front line of the challenges of sustaining those many years of development gains because of the accelerating threat of climate-related disasters,” said Khoday.

The UNDP representative pointed out that Jamaica is a case in point where the challenges of climate change are concerned and noted that, “unfortunately, the last few years — whether it’s the [COVID-19] pandemic or the combination of a double year of record disasters [such as Hurricane] Beryl and now [Hurricane] Melissa back-to-back — and so we see how that fragility is becoming a protracted situation”.

Khoday stressed that the climate crisis is a major focus of the UNDP as it continues to work to combat poverty in countries like Jamaica.

He said the UNDP’s work on access to justice, building capacity at the community level, and building resilience into the productive sectors, are key to bridging the divide between the rich and the poor.