Jubilee Caribbean is a network comprised of member churches and affiliated national councils of the Caribbean Conference of Churches (CCC). As an initiative of the member churches, it is open to all CCC members. Jubilee Caribbean, however, will collaborate with other religious bodies and social partners within the Caribbean region, which share its values. The first members of Jubilee Caribbean were from Barbados, Jamaica, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), and Trinidad and Tobago.
It was the intent at its formation that the Secretariat of the Caribbean Conference of Churches (CCC) and the Conference of Churches in Grenada (CCG) would be administratively responsible for Jubilee Caribbean. Each participant at the Conference was, within the first 3 months of the formation of Jubilee Caribbean, to attempt to start a national chapter of Jubilee Caribbean. Jubilee Germany had committed, upon request, to provide technical expertise in the process of the formation of the chapters and in guiding Jubilee Caribbean.
The responsibilities of Jubilee Caribbean are sufficiently important to ensure they are pursued by a secretariat charged exclusively with the work of JCaribbean. Jubilee Caribbean has charged itself the following tasks:
- Holding Creditors accountable;
- Encouraging national governments to implement policies and laws within the country to ensure accountability and transparency that are non-negotiable;
- Networking with the global Jubilee movement, government and Civil Society to ensure leverage in the negotiation.
In its work, Jubilee Caribbean must highlight the vulnerability of Small Island Developing States and the bearing this vulnerability has on fiscal sustainability and sovereign debt servicing.
It is our hopes to eventually have a JCaribbean chapter on each island, so that the issues can be tackled more directly and by the ones who will be most affected by their government’s decisions concerning indebtedness. This program has the potential to develop into one of the first inter-island NGO in our region.
