Ja to host three-day CARICOM seminar

A three-day sensitisation seminar on the CARICOM Results Based Management (RBM) System will be held in Jamaica starting today and ending on Thursday.

The seminar opens at 9 a.m. at the Office of the Prime Minister, where a discussion will be held with permanent secretaries of the ministries, departments, and agencies.

Cabinet Secretary, Office of the Cabinet, Ambassador Douglas Saunders, and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Ambassador Marcia Gilbert-Roberts, will bring opening remarks.

Tomorrow, there will be a meeting with parliamentarians at the Houses of Parliament, beginning at 1:30 p.m. Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Kamina Johnson Smith, will address the meeting.

On the same day at 10 a.m., Johnson Smith will speak at a CARICOM RBM seminar press briefing at the ministry's New Kingston office. Resource persons at the seminar will include representatives of the Policy and Planning and the Caribbean and Americas Departments of the Foreign Affairs Department, the Office of the Cabinet and the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service.

The seminar, to be convened in all member states on different dates, was coined at the 35th Meeting of the Conference of the Heads of Government in Antigua and Barbuda in 2014. It aims to inform a wide variety of CARICOM's stakeholders of the shift towards RBM.

CARICOM SECRETARIAT TO VISIT

Participants will include parliamentarians, senior government officials, as well as representatives of civil society and non-governmental organisations, and international development partners.

Deputy Secretary General of the CARICOM Secretariat, Ambassador Manorma P. Soeknandan, along with a delegation, will be visiting Jamaica to participate in the seminar.

Additionally, the ambassador is scheduled to make a number of media appearances over the three-day period.

"The CARICOM Secretariat is tasked with the responsibility of establishing a planning, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting system that is based on the principles of results-based management," said a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

"The CARICOM Gender-sensitive RBM System will serve as a mechanism that will facilitate improvements in the implementation of programmes by way of better communication, more realistic project schedules, useful evaluation results and enhanced accountability and transparency at all levels."