On November 10, 2014, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade reported on Jamaica’s participation in the Third International Conference of Small Island Developing States held in September 2014 in Samoa to a forum organized by the Government of Jamaica (GoJ) and the UN Country Team. The forum also heard presentations from the United Nations Resident Coordinator on the current international development context, from an officer of the Planning Institute of Jamaica on Jamaica’s submission to the Open Working Group on the post-2015 Development Agenda, from the UNDP’s Deputy Resident Representative on the Human Development Report (HDR) for 2014, and from the consultant who prepared a background paper for the national consultation.

That paper extended the list of the GoJ’s development priorities prepared by an inter-ministerial working group in the aftermath of the Samoa meeting, with issues raised by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade at the conference in Samoa, and in his report on the conference to the Senate. It then demonstrated that this extended list was a subset of the priorities of the outcome document of the SIDS conference, called the SAMOA Pathway, was aligned to Jamaica’s submission of proposed Sustainable Development Goals for the post-2015 development agenda, and was consistent with Jamaica’s long-term development plan, Vision 2030. In addition, the background paper recognized the consistency between many of Jamaica’s development priorities and the actions proposed by the UNDP’s HDR, 2014, on building resilient human development.