USAID’s programs seek to foster sustainable development, reduce poverty, and promote economic growth. Emphasis is placed on promoting youth empowerment and citizen security, reducing youth crime and violence, mitigating climate change impacts, and improving the health status and quality of care and treatment of people living with HIV and reducing new infections in populations most impacted by the epidemic. USAID currently offers development assistance to Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Kitts & Nevis, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname, Guyana, and the Bahamas.

Youth

Youth unemployment has reached acute levels and contributes to increasing youth disillusionment, marginalization, and higher risks for youth aged 10-29 involvement in crime and violence. USAID builds youth resilience to create pathways away from crime and toward productive participation in the community and economy. USAID uses a public health model for crime and violence prevention to define the local crime problem; target interventions to address risk and protective factors facing target communities and at-risk youth, and then, test and adjust interventions to ensure impact, sharing results to build a broad evidence-base on how to reduce youth crime and violence in the region. USAID delivers a holistic program that matches youth with interventions based on their level of risk, developing interventions that increase youth’s protective factors or “resilience”, provides family counseling, psychosocial support, and mentoring for at risk youth; increases the use of alternative sentencing for youth in conflict with the law; ensures detention centers foster rehabilitation; helps at-risk youth develop new skills and become more employable; and documents and shares successful models to reduce youth crime and violence across the region. An integral aspect of USAID’s approach is promoting a community-based methodology that engages youth and local stakeholders in defining problems, identifying risk and protective factors, and creating local solutions; working with regional bodies and host countries to promote evidence-based decision-making so that crime and violence data is used to better target youth crime and violence prevention policy and programming, and shifting the focus of the juvenile justice system from punishment to rehabilitation and reintegration back into society. Approximately 49,000 youth have graduated from our youth programs over the past five years.

Health

With the Caribbean recording the second highest HIV prevalence rate worldwide after Sub-Saharan Africa, USAID supports the implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) Caribbean Regional Program in countries where the epidemic still significantly out paces the response. Our new programmatic focus will address HIV prevention, care, and treatment of KPs in Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname, Barbados, and the Bahamas. Our interventions focus on: i) improving quality standards for prevention, care, and treatment of KPs; ii) supporting activities which promote service delivery in a stigma and discrimination-free environment; iii) strengthening health systems, and iv) capacity building for the LGBTI community.

Climate Change

Throughout the Caribbean, global climate change (GCC) is causing more frequent and intense weather events; changing and less clearly defined wet and dry seasons; periods of heavy rainfall and drought; increased ambient, atmospheric, and sea surface temperatures; and rising sea levels. GCC impacts the region’s economic growth, food security, public health, and livelihoods. USAID works to build technical capacity to collect and analyze climate data, strengthen the use of climate data and science in decision making, demonstrate pilot innovative initiatives to adapt to climate change, and increase access to climate financing for the scale-up and replication of successful pilot GCC adaptation initiatives.