Room For Improvement: The Gap between Public Spending and Child Outcomes in Jamaica

Across nine fiscal years and eight sectors, this report identifies 34 spe- cific commitments the government made to children and assesses each against the budget and the evidence. The question it asks is not whether Jamaica has expressed political will toward children: it plainly has. The question is whether the resourc- es committed to children actually reach them; the answer, across most sectors, is that they do not, or not fully, for two structural reasons that this report traces through the data in detail.