Poverty rates have been declining in the Anglophone Caribbean and there is an increasingly ageing population, resulting from improvements in health, nutrition, sexual and reproductive health education and targeted policies and programmes.  However, the region continues to be beset by challenges including vulnerability and inequality, high unemployment, poor educational outcomes and an at-risk youth population. Against that background, social protection, once called social welfare but now increasingly recognised to be an investment in a country’s human capital, has become much more complex.

The Graduate Diploma in Social Protection is a joint UWI/OAS initiative which began in September 2014 and aims to train public sector officials of social sector ministries, departments and agencies in the Caribbean in conceptualizing and designing social protection strategies, policies and programmes specific to the Caribbean and national context.  It aims to enhance their capacity to improve the delivery of social protection programmes and to monitor and evaluate them.

The Diploma is managed by the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, with 5 courses delivered online and managed by E-tutors, and 1 an evaluation project that is supervised locally and presented at a Residential workshop at Mona. To date, some 14 public servants from Barbados, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago have been trained.