Poverty

It is estimated that 1.3 billion people globally, live on less that 1 US dollar a day.  Developing countries are therefore working to create their own national plan to promote poverty eradication strategies based on local needs and priorities.

Through the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) the world is addressing the many dimensions of human development, including halving by 2015 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty.

The Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has placed significant emphasis on expanding the range of social services available to the vulnerable and making the delivery process more efficient.

UNDP is assisting in the achievement of this goal by providing support in the critical areas of health and education. Utilizing the services on United Nations Volunteer programme, these projects are improving health care delivery and outreach to the vulnerable and improving educational planning capacity in the Ministry of Education to ensure achievements of MDG and Vision 2020 targets.

Measuring Vision 2020 and MDG goal attainment are important for national planning. Using UNDP financing and technical assistance, the Government is addressing the weak capacity for data collection, monitoring and evaluation. The outputs from this initiative will be a comprehensive searchable socio-economic database and national capacity for monitoring, evaluating and reporting on national goal attainment.

UNDP’s poverty programme in Trinidad and Tobago has focused on informing policy development and programming delivered through a mixture of policy advice, advocacy and downstream initiatives.