The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Chief Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

NATIONAL Development Plan (NDP) Secretariat chairman Felix Stubbs says the group is making progress toward implementing the national development plan and hopes to hold its first formal meeting with committee members before the end of this month.

Mr Stubbs provided an update on the NDP’s work following last year’s Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) workshop, during which stakeholders and policy experts proposed solutions and priority actions to ensure the plan’s full implementation. Efforts to establish a National Development Plan have been ongoing for years, with officials aiming to update it to address such new priorities as climate change, irregular migration, and crime.

“It was slow progress up until just recently,” Mr Stubbs said. “Now, things are beginning to pick up like lightning speed.”

He said 70 to 80 percent of the committee had been appointed over the past two weeks, alongside the executive director.

“I’m going to be calling them and then putting them on notice, and hopefully before the end of the month, we’ll have a first formal meeting,” he said. “But we still need the technical staff to do all the research work, but we can certainly have our committee meetings and begin to formulate how we are going to move forward so that’s going to be ongoing almost immediately.”

According to Mr Stubbs, the group has been promised funding from the Office of the Prime Minister and the IDB to support its work until legislation is in place. He also confirmed seeing a draft of the proposed legislation, which he said is being worked on by the Attorney General’s Office.

He explained that the bill “will be in two forms: one to legally establish the National Development Plan and the second to create a secretariat that will manage it.”

He added: “We’ve been pressing them as much as we can. They’ve had (the draft) for a while, but they’ve had a lot of more pressing issues that they were dealing with. We needed it like ASAP, so I’m hoping that we will have it in time in order for us to be able to make our appeal for when the status 25/26 plan will be in March.”

A comprehensive 491-page draft of the NDP was first released in December 2016. The Christie administration intended to pass a National Development Plan Bill prior to the 2017 general election, believing the plan would be a pivotal document for the country’s development. The plan is supposed to include accountability mechanisms, with the University of The Bahamas expected to release regular reports on milestones. In early 2023, Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis announced the reappointment of the NDP committee.