Jamaica: Macro-Socio-Economic and Environmental Assessment of ...

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The rehabilitation programme focused on vital and basic needs, and on controlling
the spread of diseases and epidemics in order to prevent hardships from becoming more
acute. These actions will certainly overlap with the reconstruction stage.
2. Reconstruction stage
This is the most crucial stage in economic and social terms, since it will lead to
the full re-establishment of normal living conditions and the country’s economic
and social development momentum and increase the resilience reducing the
vulnerability that Hurricane Ivan made evident.
This phase ought to bring about the implementation of specific projects
that are matched to available resources and that can be assimilated by the different
economic sectors and the country’s government and financial sector. The main
aim of the reconstruction stage and the projects thereof is to effectively overcome
the direct and indirect losses stemming from the disasters, while increasing the
mitigation against a recurrence of the event that took place. For example, the
approaches to bridges have been exposed as being vulnerable to the type of water
that descended on them.
Reduced vulnerability of housing, infrastructure reconstruction that
improves on current exposure as evidenced by the damage suffered agricultural
recovery and income generating programmes are all part of this phase.
Most importantly, on designing the reconstruction programme it will be important
to take into account macroeconomic principles so as to prevent the undesirable
consequences of overly ambitious reconstruction programmes that impinge on the
overall economic performance or absorptive capacity.
3. Recommendations
The reduction of the vulnerability of the population through the strengthening of their
resilience to future natural hazards has to be the aim of any reconstruction effort.
• Small grants, soft loan facilities or community micro-financing facilities will need
to be urgently established where they don't exist and/or strengthened where they
already exist to assist persons in the rural and coastal communities at rebuilding
their livelihoods. Particular grants/lending facilities should be targeted to the
fisher folk, farmers and the women of those communities who lost assets through
damage to small shop holdings and home based enterprises, such as food
preparation and backyard gardening;
• Projects that support the improved resilience of schools as they are used as
shelters should be paired to access to education by the school age population will
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