The Caribbean and the world have committed to achieving the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These goals are a structured way of helping us to understand the different challenges that exist in our world and provide a pathway of working towards creating solutions. Ultimately we want a world where the quality of life experience is high for all. The Bahamas has a population of about 400,000 people and cxollectilvy as the Caribbean region there are just above 44,000,000. There is immense power between us should we collectively choose to use it.
During the partnership meeting we discussed different types of partnerships. These conversations helped our YME team reflect on the type of equitable partnerships we want to be part of co-creating. Key take aways from this meeting included the importance of communication. A partnership is a long term relationship especially when we live on tiny islands. Developing effective tools of communicating with partners, expressing needs, receiving constructive feedback, offering support and sitting with and working through the sometimes uncomfortableness of conflict are important skills to develop.
The absence of sustainable cashflow can create complications in achieving our sustainable development goals. Learning to see ourselves as part of a larger community is critical to ensuring that we can design programmes and projects that are inclusive to all partners throughout the different sectors of society. Data generation, access, and sharing are components of sustainable development that we must prioritise. Ensuring that organisational partners have the capacity to share the success and challenges of their work is at the bedrock of being able to build resilient communities.
The private sector and civil society must be able to work hand in hand with our governments as we build a resilient Caribbean region. Recommendations to improve the quality of partnership throughout the region would be to fund a large scale 3 year minimum capacity building grant designed specifically to work with Caribbean civil society to build out revenue generating financial and strategic plans for the respective organisations.
Ensuring that a critical mass of local organisations throughout the region have robust internal systems that support a healthy ecosystem for partnership should be our regional priority. This is in direct alignment with SDG 16 – Peace Justice and Strong Institutions and SDG 17- Partnership for the goals. The strength of our civil society and our ability to work in tandem with the private sector is essential for a shared peaceful future.
Strengthening the civil society sector throughout the Caribbean must be our collective priority. YME was thrilled to participate in this workshop and we are in deep reflection on how we can improve as a partner and build greater relationships with other organisations beyond our current organisational comfort zone.