…less finance, more technical assistance
DIRECTOR of the Sub-Regional Office for the Caribbean of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Dan Baker, has said that while the needs in the Caribbean are great, because Caribbean countries are relatively well-off compared to most developing countries and considered to be middle income countries, people are spending more money in Africa and South Asia and not a lot of money is coming here.
“So we have to do a lot with very little,” he said, giving an interview during a Youth Advisory Group workshop at the Grand Coastal Inn on Saturday.
Speaking on the economic realities that have been affecting organisations, Baker said that when the UNFPA started its work some 40 years, most of the assistance that it gave was financial.
“But countries have gained. Countries like Guyana have lots of expertise and lots of ability to carry out programmes. So what we focus on now is to give specific technical advice on cutting edge issues,” he said.
An example of this, he said, is the assistance that the UNFPA gave to Guyana with regard to GIS and how to do computer data editing. “We don’t give a lot of support in terms of financial resources but we do give in terms of technical advice and we think that it has been very useful to the country,” he said.
One of the main focuses of UNFPA’S work is population, and for this reason, UNFPA is readying itself to work with the results of the upcoming census in 2012.
He said the upcoming population census will be important for the work of the UNFPA, since it is a physical headcount of everybody. “It is the one opportunity that we have to count everybody, to get really vital information and to use that as a base for all of the kind of work that governments do, that private industry does, that social groups do during the coming ten years. That’s what the census does. It gives a baseline every ten years of the state of the population. It gives lots of valuable information as to what’s going on in the country,” he said.
“Guyana is going to do theirs. It was originally scheduled for 2010. It will now be done in 2012. So for the ten years following that, all of the planning programmes, all of the work that governments do and the planning that private enterprise does is based on the census, so it is very important,” he said.
Baker added that the upcoming census is especially important for Guyana since while there has been a lot of out migration, there has been in migration to Guyana. “And those are the kinds of things you will only get when you count every person and know where the distribution of the population is,” he said.
He noted that for example, some of the interior communities are where the birth rates are the highest. “The population you would think is increasing in those areas. You may want to look at that. Do they need more services? I’m sure they do. We need to know exactly where and what kinds of services. So I think for Guyana the 2012 census is going to be crucial,” he said.