By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

JAMAICAN officials are in The Bahamas studying its unemployment insurance programme as part of their feasibility study concerned with introducing the benefit to their country.

Audrey Deer-Williams, chief technical director in Jamaica’s Ministry of Labour and Social Security, said: “Jamaica is undertaking a feasibility study for the implementation of unemployment insurance, which would be an additional benefit under our social protection system. We have been working with the ILO and the planning institute is actually overseeing the feasibility study for further implementation.”

She spoke to the press at the Department of Labour yesterday.

Deidra Coy, the director of the Human and Community Development Unit in the Planning Institute in Jamaica, said The Bahamas’ system has been well implemented. She said officials will also visit Barbados, the only other country in the region that has unemployment insurance benefits.

“We are here to learn from the Bahamian experience of implementing unemployment benefits here in 2009 and as was your experience during COVID,” she said. “We hope to learn from this experience to see what it is that we can take away, lessons to be learned as far as implementation so we don’t repeat any mistakes that were made and to implement best practices and we’re doing that, of course, along ILO standards and guidelines and the ILO is supporting this feasibility study, both financially and technically.”

The Bahamas’ unemployment insurance system, she said, “seems to be a very robust benefit and, of course, it is one of the branches of social security so my first impression would be that it is well implemented. Of course there is always room for improvement in any system. We have learnt a lot since being here.”

Ms Coy said the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for unemployment insurance.

“The situation with the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass levels of unemployment that occurred, it is important for countries to have some kind of unemployment benefit instituted,” she said. “For Jamaica, that is the only missing element in our social protection system and so we saw the need for something like this in Jamaica and during the time that government had to institute a care programme, which was fully funded by the government, so we do see the need for it, hence the feasibility study.”

Ariel Pino, the ILO’s representative, said The Bahamas adheres to a number of international standards that guide unemployment insurance schemes.

“The analysis shows that actually there is full alignment with international standards so the unemployment benefit of the Bahamas is fully aligned with conventions one and two which is the minimal requirement of social security.”

The ILO recently submitted an actuarial review of the National Insurance Board that said the fund is not sustainable without an increase in the contribution rate.