Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Godwin Friday says data from two surveys conducted over the last six years show that St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) is facing a silent poverty crisis, with one in every three people living in poverty.
Presenting the 2026 Budget Address to Parliament on Monday, the prime minister said the assessment “reveals a stark reality” of nearly one in three Vincentians – more than 33% of the population — are “either already living in poverty or remain only a single pay cheque or natural disaster away from falling into it…
“A critical truth made evident in the recent independent poverty assessment, based on the official data and information from the 2018 Survey of Living Conditions and the 2023 Population and Housing Census, is the silent crisis of poverty,” Friday told Parliament.
The prime minister said the “cost of meeting even the most basic nutritional needs has risen sharply”, with the indigence line now exceeding $3,642 per adult per year, or roughly $10 per day, “simply to eat adequately”, and for “households, the challenge is even more pronounced”.
Friday said that in 2024, an average family of three needed to spend a minimum of EC$1,898 monthly “just to escape poverty” — a “threshold that continues to drift further out of reach” as inflation steadily reduces the value of the dollar.
The prime minister said further analysis of the data shows that poverty is concentrated in female-headed households and in rural northern communities, which were mostly economically impacted by the La Soufrière eruption of April 2021.
“This geographic divide — a relatively prosperous south and a forgotten, economically depressed north — is a central target for our administration’s One Nation transformation agenda,” he said.
Referring to the silent crisis of poverty, the prime minister further stated that one “cannot speak of a One Nation agenda if we do not have the courage to face the most uncomfortable truth of our time”.
Friday said that for too long, the true state of the nation has been “obscured and misrepresented…
“The official pronouncements and statistics have not matched the lived reality of our citizens,” said Friday, adding that the “independent assessment” is thorough and sobering.
“It reveals a nation that is showing signs of economic growth, but at the same time, this growth is not inclusive. A better standard of living and prosperity are not touching the lives of large segments of the population,” he said.
Friday, whose New Democratic Party (NDP) was elected to office in the November elections, having swamped the Unity Labour Party 14-1 to end their 24-year reign, said poverty in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is not random, but “has a specific face and a specific home”.
Friday said a significant percentage of the SVG’s poor are women-headed households.
“These women are disproportionately affected by caregiving responsibilities and limited access to land, making them more susceptible to economic shocks,” he said.
Friday said that access to healthcare and quality education remains a challenge in these remote communities, where economic pressures lead to higher school dropout rates, and limited access to formal credit or insurance means that when a disaster hits, those citizens have “no safety net” to catch them.
Friday promised that during his tenure as prime minister, such a poverty divide will end as the party’s “One Nation” transformation agenda “targets these fissures directly”.
“We are not merely providing a social safety net; we are building a ladder of opportunity,” Friday said.
Increasing Public Assistance to EC$500 per month “to throw a lifeline to the vulnerable who are drowning” in the sea of rising costs of living is one of the ways the new government is trying to ease the financial burden on poorer people.
Part of the government’s strategic intervention is woven into the Youth Guarantee Pledge.
“We will ensure that every young person in these vulnerable communities has access to a job, a training spot, or an internship,” Friday said.
“The road ahead is steep. This means we must redouble our efforts for the climb, for we will not leave another generation behind to languish and wonder why they must always be the last to savour our national bounty,” Friday told parliament.
He reiterated his government’s commitment to ending “this divide” and ensuring that “the community in which you live no longer condemns you to poverty or determines your prospects”.
In 25 years of rule Gonslaves and his family got stinking rich, most others got stinking poor. That is what this man should be known for. Forget all the socialist crap he espoused and look at the truth.
This is nothing new. I knew of poverty from I was born in 1956. I’m out of it now though.
These single mothers in female-headed households need to learn to cross their legs instead of spreading them wide.
“These women are disproportionately affected by caregiving responsibilities and limited access to land, making them more susceptible to economic shocks,” Friday said, ignoring the elementary fact that the land many of these women prefer to work is the well used property between their feet.
Simply put, the unbridled fornication that produces single motherhood is a sure route to everlasting poverty.
So, don’t blame Comrade Ralph for our entrenched immorality.