Disbursement coming for Solidarity Programme

The Ministry of Labour and Social Security has been undertaking a pilot of the digital platform Gov Payout, which will be used to facilitate payments under the $1-billion Solidarity Programme.

"We have been doing the pilot for about three to four weeks. We've been able to amend and fix and revise and go through a lot of the testing where there were several issues in terms of uploading, the size of the document and different things that were causing errors," Portfolio Minister, Pearnel Charles Jr, told JIS News.

"We are near 100 per cent in terms of capacity to upload", which means that we are now moving at a much, much faster pace in terms of identifying beneficiaries, uploading them into the system, and very soon doing disbursement," he added.

The Solidarity Programme will target the elderly; unattached youth, aged 18 to 35; persons with disabilities; informal and low-income workers; medically indigent persons; small business operators affected by disaster; and Jamaicans without a birth certificate or taxpayer registration number, providing beneficiaries with a one-time cash grant of $20,000.

Jamaicans currently receiving benefits under the Social Pension Programme, Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH), Poor Relief, the National Insurance Scheme, or the Government's Reverse Income Tax Credit are not eligible for support under the Solidarity Programme.

Gov Payout is the Government's new digital payment platform, which will enable secure, timely, and traceable disbursement of funds, primarily via direct bank transfers. It was developed by the Information and Communications Technology Authority, formerly eGov Jamaica Limited. For individuals who are not members of a financial institution or do not have bank accounts, access will be facilitated through Paymaster and authorised remittance agents. Charles stated that the disbursements will be made firstly to those persons who have been identified by their members of parliament.