An attempt to empower Jamaican squatters

Abstract

This paper describes a government programme, Operation PRIDE, that seeks to help low-income households acquire land for housing or to regularize tenure of land that they already occupy. To receive support, these low-income households have to undertake community assessments and form community organizations that are legal entities. Each household has to save and contribute to a community infrastructure fund, although there is some provision for members to contribute work in lieu of payments. Community organizations are meant to direct the programme in acquiring land and in developing infrastructure, with support from NGOs or from the staff of Operation PRIDE. Although many communities have sought to meet these pre-conditions, staff from Operation PRIDE have tended to dominate the process and, consequently, most of the community organizations have failed to develop as anticipated. This paper reflects on the weaknesses of the programme and its failure to empower squatters. It ends by describing one Jamaican community organization, COMAND, that was able to transcend these difficulties and make good use of the benefits offered under Operation PRIDE.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.