The Project Manager has taken the decision to postpone the Bajan Dream Project indefinitely.

As many of you would be aware, the Project began a recruitment drive in June 2007, seeking a new executive team to attend to the project management, financial and fund raising roles of the new NGO. The project’s model was also completely revamped to shift from its ‘charitable’ focus to a more ‘development-centred’ intervention, which would offer a basket of social services geared towards self-help and poverty alleviation.

The recruitment drive was successful and the Project Manager was able to choose a number of highly skilled and committed individuals to fill the roles required within the Project. We had also begun to head into some urban communities to identify persons ‘on the ground’ who would assist with the coordination of the project within their communities.

With personnel, a project model and community participation intact, the Project needed funding to get its plan off the ground. We have, from 2005, sought to identify sources of funding to finance the project’s operational budget but the finances available were always significantly short of the budget. You may appreciate this fact when you consider that the project was being billed as a home replacement/repair intervention (which, in itself, comes with significant costs), as well as skills training with micro-finance intervention (which further increased the cost of the project significantly).

What has always worked against us in funding the project has been our location. Simply put, a poverty alleviation project in Barbados is ineligible for grant-funding by most international donors. This was so from 2005 when Barbados was classified by the World Bank as a middle income state, but is now considerably worse when the island was recently reclassified as a high income state - sharing this ‘honour’ with countries such as Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Regardless of economic indicators, one has only to look at those aforementioned countries and compare them with Barbados to appreciate the difference between ‘high income’ and ‘highly developed’. Notwithstandnig this, our struggle for donor grant-funding has become even more difficult, when ‘economics’ says that a significant number of Barbadians aren’t struggling.

There are, of course, other lines of funding which the Project is not prepared to take. These take the form of loans, and the responsibility of repaying these loans (and their accompanying interest) would fall squarely on the Project Manager and executive team if any of the beneficiaries of the project should default on their end of the agreement. This is a risk that we are not prepared to take.

Another option, which is still being considered, is having the project relocate to another Caribbean island. We have been in talks with members of parliament in two other islands about this possibility, and we believe it would be a great disservice to the notion of Caribbean oneness if the Bajan Dream Project was to simply fold, rather than take the model to another island which is experiencing much of the same problems that we face here in Barbados.

The purpose of this post was to more clearly and adequately explain the difficulties that the Project has been facing. From its inception, the project was sometimes subject to criticism, often from persons who choose to do so anonymously and from positions of ignorance. This is to be expected in Barbados’ society, but we thank all of the supporters who over the years have tried to help the Project by volunteering their services and taking up community advocacy.

Please note that the project will not re-commence its charitable donations of funds and materials to impoverished persons. This was a fall-back during the project’s sabbatical phase, but in the end, this charitable giving does not redound to any significant or sustained benefit to the individuals involved.

We would also like to ask that those who link to our blog continue to do so, as a significant number of visitors do still come here for poverty-related information, and we will continue blogging as a means of  ’free’ advocacy.