Ministry of Labour & Social Security

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State Minister in the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, Senator Floyd Morris, has said that the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) has been streamlined to make the delivery of services to the poor and the most vulnerable more efficient.

Speaking at a post-sectoral press briefing at the Ministry's North Street office yesterday (July 12), Senator Morris disclosed that as part of the process, the beneficiary identification scheme would be revised. He further noted that the Government was ensuring that "we put in place the mechanism for strengthening the legislative framework".

Senator Morris informed that a recent assessment of the PATH programme by the United States-based policy research company, Mathematica, indicated that up to 80 per cent of individuals who accessed benefits under the programme were "amongst the poorest groups within our society".

Meanwhile, in his contribution to the 2006/07 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on Tuesday (July 11), Minister of Labour and Social Security, Derrick Kellier, said PATH had become a model programme, as since 2005, the World Bank and the United Nations Children's Fund had sent delegations from South Africa, Belize, Suriname and Bahamas and Kenya to study the programme.

According to the Ministry's annual report for 2006, which was recently tabled in the House, as at March 2006, more than $140 million was disbursed to some 154,488 PATH recipients. This represents an increase of more than 11.6 per cent in comparison to figures for 2005.

The programme operates on the premise that subscribers meet basic health and education conditionalities and aims to: increase educational achievement and improve health; reduce child labour by requiring an 85 per cent school attendance; reduce current poverty by increasing the value of benefits to the poor and serve as a safety net for poor families.

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