JSIF Advancing Community-Centric Approach to Capacity Building

The Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF) continues to employ a community centric model that strengthens local capacity through its interventions, enabling residents to take an active role in both decision making and implementation.

Managing Director, Omar Sweeney, shared during a recent Jamaica Information Service (JIS) ‘Think Tank’ that communities impacted by the Fund’s initiatives are actively encouraged to make meaningful contributions, ensuring their voices shape both the process and outcomes.

“We have applied methodologies such as community contribution and community-based contracting that enable communities to participate in a real way,” he said.

Mr. Sweeney noted that the JSIF works to establish trust with communities from the outset, employing initiatives such as community fairs to share information and raise awareness.

“This is not a top-down approach. This is an approach where, from the beginning, the trust is built in the communities. They’re organised, they are brought to make decisions… then we manage the process of implementation,” he pointed out.

The Managing Director added that JSIF’s interventions respond primarily to issues that matter to residents across different areas of their lives.

“[This] is important because, when you enter a community, these are the things that people care about. They want to know that they don’t have high transportation costs, that they can send their children to a good school. They want to know that they don’t have to travel very far from their children or their homes to go to work,” he said.

Mr. Sweeney underscored the importance of creating opportunities in areas such as agriculture and community tourism.

“Providing additional opportunities for agriculture and community tourism allows you to… build livelihoods and a local economy within the community. This, also, from a macro perspective, is what mitigates the rural-to-urban drift of persons coming into the urban areas to achieve a livelihood,” he stated.

The Managing Director further noted that JSIF seeks to ensure that educational institutions in rural communities possess attributes comparable to those in larger urban centres.

“Just because a school is in Islington, St. Mary, does not mean that it should not have the same attributes of a school… an early-childhood institution… in Kingston or Montego Bay,” Mr. Sweeney said.