The Tribune

By NATARIO MCKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Government’s leading official on the National Development Plan yesterday said its Secretariat had completed a first draft of the project, describing it as a “solutions and strategy” based-document.

Dr Nicola Virgil-Rolle said that moving on from the diagnostic phase of the Secretariat’s work, which culminated in the recently-released ‘State of the Nation’ report, it has now completed its first draft.

“We have a first draft ready now that we are just tightening up the wording,” Dr Virgil-Rolle said. She was speaking with the media at a seminar on  ‘innovation, transparency and service delivery’, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in conjunction with the National Development Plan Secretariat.

“It’s going to be a document which is very action-oriented, where the average person can look at it and tick off something to say that it was done,” said Dr Virgil-Rolle.

“The state of the nation report was a diagnostic. It looked at the strengths that we have and the challenges. We feel that it was brutally honest and very sobering in terms of providing the outlook on where we are.

“That was the first component.  We continued our consultations with Bahamians in order to get where we are now, phase III, the actual drafting of the national development plan,” Dr Virgil-Rolle added.

“It takes a long-term look with short, medium and long-term goals of the key solutions. It’s a solutions-based document, a strategy-based document, which has as its logical framework a set of goals, and then a set of strategies under each of those goals under four key areas, namely the economy, governance, social policy and the environment.”