Minister of Social Care, Dr. Denis Lowe
Those social services which fall under the Ministry of Social Care should soon be undergoing “a broad restructuring”. These include services from agencies such as the Welfare Department, the National Assistance Board and the Poverty Alleviation Bureau.
That is the word from Minister of Social Care, Constituency Empowerment and Urban Development, Dr. Denis Lowe.
Speaking during a recent interview with the Barbados Government Information Service, Dr. Lowe said that Government needed to be able to get maximum results from its social investment and “if it is going to do that, it means that we have to look at how we evaluate the programmes that we have in place”.
He remarked: “We have to ensure that persons are not kept at a stage of dependency on the social services, but that the social services operate on four platforms” – the point of intervention, the phase of stabilisation, the enabling stage, and the empowerment stage.
Dr. Lowe explained that in the very near future, persons who use the services of the Ministry of Social Care would go through each stage until they are able to use their skills (new and existing) “to be able to become self-sufficient and be the architects of their own destiny”.