Kimberly Stewart | Whose job is it to fix the spending gap for children? 

Blame is not a useful response to a structural problem. A problem is structural when it is built into the rules, the incentives, and the institutional design of a system; it persists regardless of who holds any particular office because the conditions that produce it remain unchanged. Jamaica's gap between what it spends on children and what children actually receive is that kind of problem. The right question is not who is responsible. The right question is, what, precisely, needs to change? 

Room for improvement: The Gap Between Public Spending and Child Outcomes in Jamaica (2026), a study commissioned by UNICEF Jamaica and produced by CAPRI as a report, documents three structural conditions that, together, explain the gap. Each is worth examining carefully because each points to a different systemic weakness, and, therefore, a different kind of fix. 

The first is wage bill absorption. By 2025-26, compensation of employees had risen to 86 per cent of total child-focused education expenditure. That figure reflects an objective reality: decades of deferred public sector pay reform, corrected in one large adjustment through the 2022 wage restructuring, produced a compensation bill that overshadows allocations for school maintenance, teaching materials, and direct programme delivery. Better-paid teachers working in under-resourced classrooms cannot produce better outcomes regardless of their individual competence or commitment. The problem is not the professionals. It is the fiscal space left over after they are paid. 

The second structural condition is the absence of accountability. Jamaica's public financial management framework contains no requirement for any ministry or agency to identify what it spends on children, set child-specific output targets, or report against them. Budget templates do not ask for it. No legislation compels it. A 2024 assessment of Jamaica's budget systems found that only 30 per cent of ministries include output and outcome indicators in the Estimates of Expenditure at all. The consequence is invisible spending. Allocations flow, but whether they reach children, in what form, and to what effect, is simply not tracked. Without that information, it is impossible to identify where gaps exist or whether resources are being used well. 

The third structural constraint is a lifecycle imbalance: the cognitive and developmental foundations that determine whether a child can benefit from schooling are largely formed before that child enters a classroom, in the first three years of life. Jamaica's child-focused investment in those years is limited and structurally unprotected in the budget. It does not have the visibility, the ring-fencing, or the tracking that would allow Parliament or the public to see whether it is adequate or growing. The relatively large investment in education that follows is, therefore, working against a deficit it did not create and cannot fully overcome. 

Taken together, these three conditions constitute a system that spends on children without being designed to deliver for them. The wage bill consumes the allocation before it reaches operational delivery; the accountability gap means no one can measure the shortfall; and the lifecycle imbalance means that the highest-return window closes largely unattended. None of this is the fault of any single administration, not this one, or the one before. All of it requires legislative and institutional change to fix or else the next administration will be faced with the same situation. 

That change is specific and achievable: Parliament should mandate child-disaggregated reporting in the Estimates of Expenditure, requiring ministries to identify child-relevant allocations, set output targets, and report annually against them. A budget coding system could be established to enable that tracking systematically rather than through ad hoc analytical exercises. And early childhood investment should be given a defined budget line (defined budgets lines across different ministries, departments, and agencies) with explicit protection, including against inflation, so that fiscal pressures in any given year do not erode the foundation on which every subsequent education dollar depends. 

The question of who bears responsibility for making this happen has a clear answer: the ministers who table budgets, the parliamentarians who approve them, and the citizens who hold them to account. That is not an accountability question in the sense of blame. It is a realistic description of where institutional authority sits and where public pressure must be applied. The structures that produce the gap between spending and outcomes were built incrementally, without intent to harm children, and they will need to be dismantled just as deliberately. What the report establishes is that Jamaica now has the analysis to act on and the fiscal breathing room with which to do so. The remaining question is whether the political will exists and whether citizens will demand that it does.

Kimberly Stewart is a research assistant at CAPRI. Send feedback to communications@capricaribbean.org.