Ministry of National Security welcomes new Permanent Secretary

Economist and deputy financial secretary at the Ministry of Finance and Public Service, Courtney Williams, has been appointed as the new permanent secretary in the Ministry of National Security.

Williams began his public sector career in 1995 when he first served as a senior fiscal economist in the Fiscal Policy Management Unit at the Finance Ministry. 

He later became senior director in 2005 and served in that capacity for eleven years. 

Since then, he has served as senior advisor to the executive director for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C.  During this period, he represented Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines at the IMF’s executive board, where he advocated for intensified financial and technical assistance from multilateral institutions to small states in a bid to strengthen resilience against natural disasters and the effects of climate change. 

In January of this year, he was promoted to deputy financial secretary, Technical Advisory Coordination in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service. In this capacity, he was responsible for the development and execution of Jamaica’s most impactful socio-economic intervention package, the COVID-19 Allocation of Resources for Employees (CARE) programme, which has benefited close to 500,000 people. 

Williams will succeed Dianne McIntosh, whose tenure ends today. She will take up duties as executive director for the newly created Citizens Security Plan (CSP) secretariat on October 1.

McIntosh will now have responsibility for coordinating, monitoring and evaluating the implementation of social intervention programmes across in excess of 15 implementing agencies in accordance with the CSP that has been approved by Cabinet.

The overall mandate of the CSP secretariat is to ensure social intervention programmes are mainstreamed within the agencies and departments of Government for the transformation of select communities.

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