Kingstown, St. Vincent, May 25, 2026 – A senior World Bank official has praised St Vincent and the Grenadines and other Eastern Caribbean states for making significant progress in strengthening social protection systems, while warning that major challenges still remain across the region.
Speaking at the 10th Meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee on Human and Social Development, held under the theme *“Advancing Social Protection in the OECS: Policy, Practice and Learning”, World Bank representative Mr Clemente Avila said regional governments had moved beyond broad policy discussions and were now focused on implementing real reforms.
Mr Avila thanked the Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Commission for hosting the event, describing recent discussions as “very rich” and constructive.
He said countries across the OECS had made visible progress in areas such as integrated information systems and the digitization of social protection payments, with some states already moving “to the frontier of social protection”.
Mr Avila also suggested that artificial intelligence could eventually play a role in improving the efficiency of social workers and expanding support to vulnerable groups.
However, he cautioned that progress across the region had been uneven.
“We are still hearing that in some of the places, in some of the countries, there are serious constraints, staffing constraints, manual processes, and fragmented systems,” he said.
The World Bank official said such difficulties were common among small island developing states, which often face limited staffing, fiscal pressures and repeated emergencies that disrupt long-term reform efforts.
Despite those challenges, he argued that stronger regional collaboration could help countries avoid tackling problems in isolation.
“One of the strengths of this process is that countries across the OECS are increasingly able to learn from each other experiences,” Mr Avila said, adding that governments should share both successful initiatives and failures to improve policymaking across the region.
He said development partners such as the World Bank should support country-led reforms rather than impose separate agendas.
Mr Avila also pointed to what he described as growing “momentum, commitment and institutional learning” in the region’s social protection systems, even if progress sometimes appeared gradual.
He concluded by saying the true success of social protection reforms would not be measured by meetings or policy documents, but by whether vulnerable people were able to access support during times of hardship and crisis.