Editorial | What NaRRA needs from Peru

The chief executive officer of the NaRRA, Ambassador Antony Anderson, is in Peru this week studying that country’s experience with reconstruction, resilient infrastructure, and large-scale project delivery. The visit, funded by the UK Government, comes at a critical moment for Jamaica.

The NaRRA became operational on June 1 with an ambitious mandate: coordinate Jamaica’s post-Hurricane Melissa reconstruction, overcome bureaucratic fragmentation, and accelerate major projects. Anderson has described the moment as perhaps Jamaica’s greatest development opportunity in a long time.

Peru, given its experience with disaster recovery, is an excellent classroom. But Jamaica should be careful about the lesson it brings home.

The most important lesson is not simply how to build infrastructure faster. It is how to build national capability.

Following the devastating 2017 El Niño, Peru launched a major reconstruction programme. In 2020, it entered a government-to-government agreement with the United Kingdom covering roughly £1.7 billion in investments across 13 regions, including schools, health facilities, and flood-control infrastructure. British firms provided technical assistance, programme management, and international expertise.

Six years later, the initiative is promoted internationally as a model that combines structured project management, international standards, and results-oriented delivery. More importantly, it has emphasized knowledge transfer and institutional strengthening alongside physical construction.

That should be the central takeaway for Jamaica.

Beyond procurement

The Government’s rationale for creating the NaRRA was that Jamaica’s cumbersome procurement systems and fragmented bureaucracy have hindered project implementation. There is considerable truth in that assessment. Ministries and agencies operating through multiple layers of approval can transform even simple projects into prolonged exercises in administration. The Troy bridge linking Trelawny and Manchester became a symbol of that weakness.

However, procurement is only one bottleneck within a much larger system.

A road cannot be built simply because a contract is awarded quickly. It also requires engineering designs, land acquisition, environmental approvals, financing, contractors, equipment, materials, skilled labour, supervision, and timely decisions.

Project success depends on coordinating these elements effectively.

Development is not primarily about having resources. It is about having the institutional, technological, and productive capabilities to combine resources efficiently.

Instead of asking, “How do we get around cumbersome procurement?” Jamaica should ask, “What prevents us from consistently converting money and plans into completed projects?”

The answers may reveal shortages of experienced project managers, engineers, and quantity surveyors. Local contractors may have technical expertise but lack the working capital or bonding capacity needed for larger projects. Approvals may proceed sequentially when they could be handled concurrently. Construction materials may become scarce as reconstruction accelerates.

Centralization is a logical response to fragmentation, but the NaRRA must resist becoming a super-agency.

Instead, it should function as the systems integrator of Jamaica’s reconstruction programme: agile enough to move quickly, powerful enough to coordinate agencies and identify bottlenecks, and disciplined enough to stay within its mandate.

This is where Peru’s experience offers valuable guidance. International expertise should not merely build Jamaican infrastructure. It should help build Jamaican capability.

Peru’s partnership with Britain incorporated technical assistance, international project-management practices, and knowledge transfer. British assessments say the arrangement improved delivery while embedding stronger procurement, transparency, and resilience standards within Peru’s project-delivery system.

An industrial-policy opportunity

Every major NaRRA project should have two objectives: the physical asset itself and the capability created.

How many Jamaican engineers gained advanced project-management experience? How many local contractors graduated into larger contract categories? What technologies were transferred? Which domestic firms acquired new competencies? Which ministries and municipalities strengthened their ability to manage complex projects?

Rebuilding after Hurricane Melissa should therefore be viewed not only as a reconstruction challenge but also as an industrial-policy opportunity.

Billions of dollars will flow through construction, engineering, energy, water, telecommunications, and transport. Jamaica can either import much of the associated expertise or use that expenditure strategically to deepen domestic capability in resilient construction and project delivery.

The NaRRA should create a reconstruction bottleneck map, identifying the engineers, contractors, equipment, financing, materials, approvals, and institutional decisions required for major programmes and comparing projected demand with existing capacity.

Where deficiencies are identified, interventions should target the constraint. If the bottleneck is contractor finance, address finance. If it is technical manpower, recruit and train. If it is imported construction materials, develop alternative supply chains or encourage domestic production.

Such an approach would represent an important shift in Jamaican economic thinking, moving from administering expenditure to building capability.

Increasingly, Jamaica’s greatest constraint is not a lack of funding but an inability to transform resources into productive assets rapidly, efficiently, and consistently.

Anderson should return from Peru with more than procurement procedures, organizational charts, and project-management techniques. He should bring home something more valuable: a strategy for building national capability.

Ultimately, the NaRRA’s success may be measured by two questions: Did Jamaica rebuild faster and better after Melissa? More importantly, did the country emerge with stronger institutions, deeper expertise, and greater capacity to deliver future projects?

If the answer to both is yes, the real reconstruction will have succeeded.