Back in the month of May, a special public consultation meeting was called by the Ministry of Social Services to assess the points of community concern that would be necessary for the creation of a social protection policy for Anguilla’s most vulnerable people.
Facilitating that meeting was Mr. David Cownie, a Social Protection Consultant attached to UNICEF, along with Ms. Lyanna Harracksingh, UNICEF’s Social Policy Officer for the Eastern Caribbean.
Currently, both Mr. Cownie and Ms. Harracksingh are on island, once again. They are conducting high-level seminars with stakeholders in which they are presenting a draft on the social protection policy, largely based upon the information which they accumulated in their first meeting.
Dr. Bonnie Richardson-Lake is the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Social Services. On Tuesday, July 25th, she hosted the seminar on the policy, in which community stakeholders worked in three groups to analyze the draft.
Dr. Richardson-Lake told The Anguillian: “What we are doing today, is going through the draft and getting stakeholders’ input on determining whether or not it covers what is needs to cover. The participants will provide us with some advice on what should be included in the draft and advise us on what the amendments should be made.
“The reason we wanted to develop this policy is because we do a lot of social protection work across government sectors, but we do not have a framework where we can pull it all together and operate such protection functions in a comprehensive manner. We want to create efficiencies in terms of delivering our services. We are not in a position to expand our services right now, but certainly we want to make sure that we are targeting the people who need our services most. We want to provide services to people who actually need those services and we want to be sure that we are not using our resources on persons who do not require such services.
“Along with the policy, we have an action plan that helps us implement the policy and also a Monitoring and Evaluation (MNE) framework to make sure that we are moving towards the targets that we have committed to. In the policy, government has made certain commitments on what we want to do. The MNE framework ensures that we are actually moving in that direction with those commitments.”
