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IN communities like August Town in Kingston and Cornwall Courts in St James, young people face daily reminders of unmet promises: roads that remain unpaved, schools lacking basic resources, community centres that never materialised. But for Africka Stephens, executive founder of Fi We Children Foundation, these aren’t just stories of neglect — they’re opportunities for youth empowerment.

The Fi We Children Foundation (FWCF) is a non-partisan, non-government organisation dedicated to empowering Jamaican youth, with a…

ALTHOUGH there are 4,500 children in State care and more than 150 approved adopters waiting, fewer than 20 children are adopted annually, according to local think tank Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI).

The entity, in its most recently released study focused on non-kin adoptions of children who are wards of the State and their placement with approved adoptive parents, says it has found that “Jamaica’s low rate of adoption is not the result of cultural resistance or lack of demand, but of institutional…

A new policy report has identified outdated legislation as one of three interlocking constraints to non-kin adoptions in Jamaica .

The others are: an ambiguous governance framework and chronic under-resourcing, which together slow and block adoption.

The findings are contained in “Home Advantage: Reforming Jamaica’s Adoption System,” the first policy report of 2026, released by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI).

CAPRI fellow, Aleem Mahabir says thousands of children are in state care and each year, only…

The Caribbean Policy Research Institute, CAPRI, has called for more robust systems to support Jamaica’s single-use plastics ban, arguing that enforcement remains weak and data limited — a challenge also faced by others in the Caribbean.

“So across the region, we’re seeing a pattern where the bans work best in major supermarkets, but less so in the informal sector,” said CAPRI lead researcher Dominique Augustine at a forum in Kingston last week. “We see that there is inconsistent enforcement,” he said.

Some 16 nations across…

Since the passage of Hurricane Melissa, there have been public concerns about accountability in the spending of recovery funds. The Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal recalls how, during the COVID-19 crisis, the Ministry of Finance and the Auditor General’s Department pioneered a real-time audit model that successfully protected public resources.

When Jamaica moved in 2020 to address the economic shocks of the pandemic, the question was not only what to spend, but how to ensure that money reached the intended people without waste…

Caribbean nations face an increasing threat from super hurricanes, which can cost a significant fraction of their GDP. Climate change is expected to make the strongest hurricanes stronger.

In the western Pacific, there is a special name for high-end Category 4 and 5 typhoons with winds exceeding 150 mph (240 km/h): super typhoons. No equivalent terminology exists in the Atlantic for “super hurricanes.” But perhaps there should be, because these strongest of the strong storms are an increasing threat to the viability of…