Let’s Get Involved
It is my pleasure to bring you greetings on behalf of H.E. Mr Edwin Carrington, Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and indeed the entire CARICOM Secretariat. Today, 14 June 2010, we are engaging partners in a discussion on the future of one of the most impressive and important undertakings. One that may be deemed an investment in the health of the people of the Caribbean and which could well make this event a landmark in the annals of the CARICOM regional integration process.
When the CARICOM Heads of Government approved the establishment of CARPHA at their Inter-Sessional Meeting in March 2010, it marked a significant step in the history of public health development in the CARICOM Region. According to the records of the CARICOM Secretariat, the idea of an “integrated” public health agency is neither new nor novel. The CARICOM records show that the issue was raised during the 1980 Meeting of the Standing Committee of Health Ministers, which noted that there was need to follow up on a mechanism for “rationalization” of the Region’s health services.
Again, in 1984, a special meeting of health officials to discuss the operationalisation of the Caribbean Cooperation in Health raised the issue of “integrating” the health institutions to facilitate the more effective sharing of health services in the Region. The idea is again referred to in the PAHO/IDB Report on Health Systems in the Caribbean presented to the then Caribbean Group for Economic Cooperation and Development (1996) at the World Bank, and in the Report of the Caribbean Commission on Health and Development (2006). In the more contemporary period since 2000, a series of studies and reports commissioned by CARICOM have underscored the efficacy of consolidating the regional health institutions.
So here we are today to help to make this idea a reality!
This Partners’ meeting is taking place at a time when the Caribbean Community, and in particular the Caribbean Community Secretariat, are giving much attention to the status and operations of the Caribbean Community Institutions and Associate Institutions, of which there are approximately 26. So important are they to the functioning of the Community that there is an annual Secretary-General’s meeting of CARICOM Institutions. They, after all, provide technical support in the form of ongoing research, information and policy guidance in several areas to the national governments; the OECS Sub-region and to the CARICOM Region. Among these areas are agriculture, climate change, crime and security, disaster management, fisheries, meteorology and water – not to mention the five regional health institutions which are the focus of our attention at this meeting.
Others, like the Caribbean Regional Organization for Standards & Quality (CROSQ), the Caribbean Competition Commission (CCC) and the latest addition, the Caribbean Health and Food Safety Agency (CAHFSA) inaugurated in March 2010, are designed to establish and implement common standards for the orderly management and regulation of the Community’s business within the CARICOM Single Market.
In some instances, the services of our regional institutions, among them CAREC, CFNI and the highly acclaimed Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP) reach beyond CARICOM to embrace the English, French and Dutch overseas countries. In other instances, these arrangements are reciprocal and drive the principles and practices of cooperation among the linguistic zones of the Region and among Development Partners in the global arena.
These regional institutions are vital, since they spread the face of the community across our Member States, with locations in Belize to the north, through to Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, and Suriname in the south. The CARICOM Secretariat, the hub of the regional administrative processes, is of course located in Guyana, with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States as an important sub-regional focal point in Saint Lucia.
What is however even more significant for a gathering such as the one present at this Partners’ Meeting today, is that the CARICOM Secretariat has been mandated by our Heads of Government, to present proposals for the rationalisation of the institutions of the Community .
The policy paper on this topic, to be presented to the Conference of Heads of Government Meeting in Jamaica in July 2010, sites the consolidation of the five RHIs into CARPHA as an outstanding example of the future direction for operations and governance arrangements of regional institutions. In addition, the intergovernmental agreement that is designed to give legal effect to CARPHA, will most likely serve as a model for future consolidated institutional arrangements within the Community.
In the presentations at the plenary sessions that follow, it will no doubt become clearer how invaluable developments, such as CARPHA, are to the substantiality of the regional integration process. CARPHA, like the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) which held its inaugural meeting in 1973 (the same year in which the Treaty of Chaguaramas established CARICOM) and the University of the West Indies (UWI) which was established even before, in 1948, to take two other examples, fully illustrate the value and virtue of functional cooperation which underpin the viability of the Caribbean Single Market (CSM) in operation since 2006. In fact, according the Report of the CARICOM Task Force on Functional Cooperation (2008), “cooperation in health and education were the outstanding successes of regional integration long before economic trade had made any significant impact”. No doubt ventures such as CARPHA will help to cement the effectiveness of the ambitious vision and mission to achieve a CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) by 2015.
On behalf of the Caribbean Community Secretariat, I wish to express gratitude to all Partners for responding so favorably to the joint invitation of the Secretary-General and the Director of PAHO who, beyond a doubt, has been one of the champions of this process. She and her staff, especially the Caribbean Programme Coordinator in Barbados, have contributed in no small measure to the steps taken toward the realisation of CARPHA.
There are many others who have graciously assisted the Secretariat, without whose willing support we could not have arrived at this juncture to the stage of this Partners’ Meeting. Among them are:
• Our esteemed Lead CARICOM Head for Human Resource Development, Health and HIV/AIDS , the Hon. Dr Denzil Douglas, Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis
• CARICOM Ministers of Health
• Chair, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, Minister of Health, Guyana who guided the procedures of the CARPHA Steering Committee over the past two years
• Other Members of the Committee
• Sir George Alleyne and other members of the CARPHA Advisory Group
• Directors of the Regional Health Institutions
• Governments of Canada, USA and UK
• My colleagues at the CARICOM Secretariat, especially Dr Jerome Walcott, CARPHA Project manager
As we move forward with this noble venture, it is appropriate to recall the oft quoted stanza from the poem You are Involved by the renowned Guyanese writer, Martin Carter:
Like a jig
Shakes the loom;
Like a web
Is spun the pattern
All are involved!
All are consumed!
Let the refrain from this Partners’ Meeting be that we are all involved and consumed in guaranteeing the success of CARPHA.
