CARICOM Tasks the Media to Focus on Results

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ed by CARICOM deputy secretary-general Manorma Soeknandon, a delegation has taken on the job of encouraging member states to adopt a results-based management approach in national affairs. On Thursday Soeknandon said that presently Caribbean countries execute national projects by stakeholders taking several separate actions and “in the end everyone is going everywhere but we don’t know where we’re heading”. This has resulted in sundry activities with no specific goals, duplication of projects in the same region, and saturation of funds with excess that cannot be used, or the defunding of projects.

Soeknandon described results-based management as “a tool to work with when you want to measure, track down, monitor, evaluate results. What we are saying is this is the result we want to achieve, and this is what needs to be done in this timeline.”

However, in the Caribbean, a damper on strategy, policies and fabrication of numerous important national facilities, services or equipment has always been implementation deficit—the inability for professionals in the country to do their part for the projects to happen.

Philip Dalsou, permanent secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, is presently CARICOM’s point of contact in Saint Lucia for the country’s transition to results-based management. At Thursday’s press conference, concerning implementation deficit in the Caribbean, he said: “I read a study from the CDB. It [implementation deficit] varied from about 40% to maybe just over 70% in some countries, but OECS was in the bottom rank in the range of those numbers. There’s no doubt that we need to utilize an RBM framework to allow us to do so.”

The first results-based management report from the CARICOM Secretariat is expected in the first quarter of 2019. Again, relating to implementation deficit Dalsou said, “As part of the results we can see where the bottlenecks are; who is falling short and what interventions we need to take to improve those bottlenecks.”

But if national projects become jammed by “bottlenecks” and budgets, and deadlines are not being kept for implementation, then even with the advent of results-based management, Soeknandon says the the media and the public should be closely monitoring progress. According to her, in the past, member states have not communicated national agendas clearly and this has to change as part of results-based management.

With this, the media and the public must be able to identify steps clearly. Soeknandon said, “If you see that it is going slow or stakeholders are not meeting deadlines or you see that the targets are not being reached on time, you then can hold the respective stakeholders—be it the parliamentarians who have to pass laws or ratify, be it the ministries who are not doing the consultations, be it the CARICOM secretariat—you can hold them responsible, accountable for not doing what they are supposed to do.”