Laws to protect vulnerable groups soon

A slew of new laws aimed at protecting the disabled, the elderly and other vulnerable groups could be before Parliament by the beginning of 2023.

Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey said on Tuesday that the highly anticipated pieces of legislation will soon be ready.

“I just received in my hand the final elderly policy. We are told that by the end of November we will have the draft instructions for the legislation, which tells me that by early next year we should have draft legislation. We have the draft legislation for persons with disabilities. We also have the legislation pretty much complete for the child protection policy,” he announced as he delivered brief remarks at the start of the Responsive Social Protection in the Caribbean Training Programme at the Accra Beach Hotel.

Despite the laws on the horizon, Humphrey said “there is a lot more work to be done”.

“We are a lot better off today than we were a year ago, but we are still not as good as we ought to be,” he told participants of the programme which is hosted by the World Food Programme in partnership with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA).

While receiving 95 new tablets donated to his ministry by the co-hosts, Humphrey stressed the importance of the training programme, citing the need for the region, and Barbados in particular, to refine processes and frameworks that govern social services for citizens.

He said this was particularly vital given the increase in natural disasters and global shocks.

“If we have a strong social protection system, if we have one that works, we not only respond faster but then we have a little bit more resistance to deal with it better in the first place. And, therefore, if we can build those systems, we prevent those worst-case scenarios from happening,” Humphrey contended.

“I felt very strongly that during COVID, and oftentimes during a lot of these shocks, the problem is that we treat these things as if they are not social problems…. COVID was a social problem and we treated COVID primarily as if it were a medical issue – which it was, of course – but it was also a social problem and if we kept that at the forefront of our thinking then we would put in extra systems to be able to help the poor.

“I know, for example, that we are now dealing with persons with disabilities who suffered immensely during COVID because we were so concerned about our capacity to be able to help people to live, that we forgot people needed to feel alive even as they live…. I fear that if we have a very serious disaster now, that those among us who need that support the most may not get the level of support that they necessarily need, and that is why we need to do this training,” Minister Humphrey added. (SB)