Government seals KOICA land upgrade pact, expands health upkeep spending, and maps fertility support

The Government has signed with the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) on the Land Administration Capacity (LAC) programme to strengthen institutions, skills, and geospatial tools for managing land.

A Land Administration Innovation Centre (LIIC) will open at 84 Harbour Street in Kingston for the National Land Agency and wider government, with upgraded offices, conference rooms, laboratories, storage, desktops, furniture, rugged laptops, surveying equipment, drones, and specialised software.

KOICA is providing up to nine million United States dollars, about one point four two billion Jamaican dollars, from 2025 to 2031, with an inception ceremony held Tuesday in the Jamaica House Banquet Hall.

Prime Minister Dr. Andrew Holness said the programme should ease barriers around secure tenure by improving the skills, systems, and technologies that make land administration more efficient, transparent, and productive. Mr. Jong Oo, chargé d’affaires at the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, reaffirmed Seoul’s commitment to Jamaica’s land framework and geospatial cadre, calling it a first step toward transparent digital governance and stronger administrative performance.

During Parliament’s 2026–2027 sectoral debate, Minister of Health and Wellness Dr. Christopher Tufton announced a one-billion-dollar Health Infrastructure Maintenance Fund to curb outages through asset inventories, clustered facilities, manuals, and upkeep of mechanical, electrical, plumbing, climate-control, and lift systems, with contractor key performance indicators, while preparatory work continues in the ministry’s infrastructure planning division.

Tufton introduced a five-hundred-million-dollar Community Arranged Response Effort (CARE) fund for about two years of community, faith-based, and civil-society projects tied to non-communicable disease prevention, with proposals invited from Monday, 15 June, across ten themes spanning family support, isolation, mental health, and substance misuse.

A national fertility and family support strategy is to be drafted within twelve months through a multi-stakeholder task force weighing child credits and allowances, leave changes, subsidised childcare and early childhood expansion, wider public infertility and male reproductive health services, and parenting education. Officials cite fertility near one point three children per woman, under the roughly two point one replacement rate, with implications for the economy, labour pool, and ageing society. Tufton said the state was not urging births for statistics but aimed to make family formation affordable and structurally supported.

An 11 May United Nations Development Programme regional study, Democracies Under Pressure: Re-imagining the Futures of Democracy and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, ranks Jamaica highest in the Caribbean on the 2025 electoral democracy index at zero point eight, with 1990s-era marks near zero point seven five to zero point eight two, fifty-three per cent naming democracy as the best system, and watchdogs including National Integrity Action and the Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal tracking public contracts and spending.