KFC just dropped its first location in St. Thomas at the Morant Bay Urban Centre after the parish waited forever for the chain to show up. The restaurant created over 50 jobs and cost more than $350 million to build, and locals started camping out from 2 am to be first in line when doors opened.
Marketing manager Andrei Roper said the brand was pumped to finally serve the area after residents had to travel forever just to get their chicken fix. Most of the new hires came from Morant Bay and nearby communities, and the company is banking on steady foot traffic to help the urban center grow.
The opening brings KFC's total island footprint to 43 spots, with 29 outside Kingston. One taxi driver said he had been waiting 32 years for this...
Jamaica just locked down $6.7 billion in disaster financing after Hurricane Melissa ripped through the island, and Prime Minister Andrew Holness told parliament the speed was basically unheard of. The package came from a bunch of international lenders working together, and the country already tapped $662 million from emergency funds it had set up before the storm even hit.
Holness said the whole thing shows how much prep work Jamaica did beforehand with risk financing tools that could get triggered fast. The damage estimates are sitting around $8.8 billion, and there is another $3.6 billion lined up over three years for rebuilding infrastructure and helping out vulnerable households.
The lenders are also throwing in $12 million for...
Jamaica's Banana Board is cutting checks worth J$20 million to 116 farmers who got wrecked by Hurricane Melissa back in October. General Manager Janet Conie said the money helps growers buy fertilizer and restart production after the Category Five storm torched banana fields across the country. If farmers can get fertilizer down within six weeks of the hurricane hitting, they might salvage a harvest in seven months.
The storm absolutely demolished agriculture on the island, with over 70,000 farmers taking losses and 41,390 hectares getting hammered. Banana growers lost about $2.9 billion worth of crops, while vegetables took an $8.8 billion hit. Poultry farmers got destroyed with 458,000 laying birds gone, and another 780,000 broilers...
Five Jamaicans just scored Fulbright scholarships to hit up grad school in America. Daniel Jennings is heading to Rice for environmental science, Elton Johnson wants to study dancehall culture at Florida Atlantic, Dr Shennae Miller is doing public health at Emory and Johns Hopkins, Abigail Williams is getting into Caribbean history research, and Brandon Stewart got tapped for the Humphrey Fellowship to work on tax policy stuff.
The US embassy guy said the whole point is pushing education and merit as ways countries actually get better. Williams wants to build up Jamaica's creative economy when she gets back, and Miller has been grinding through everything from HIV work to disaster response. Stewart spent years dealing with tax admin...
The Caribbean is about to see remittances jump by 9.2% this year, with total flows hitting around $20.9 billion, according to a fresh report from the Inter-American Development Bank. The Dominican Republic is absolutely crushing it with $11.9 billion expected, which is more than half the whole region's haul. Haiti comes second at $4.9 billion, and most of that cash originates from the United States and Canada.
The US sends over half of all Caribbean remittances at 50.4%, while Canada chips in another 10.6%. Remittances as a share of GDP across the region are climbing from 9.2% to 10%, mostly because Dominican Republic numbers are spiking hard.
Haiti is the weird outlier, though, with its remittance-to-GDP ratio actually dropping by...
Grenada dropped its fattest budget ever at EC$1.96 billion, which is about EC$47 million more than last year. Finance Minister Dennis Cornwall said the whole thing is covered, even with an EC$309.8 million deficit that gets handled through government deposits and some borrowing. The money goes toward oil and gas development plans, an EC$50 million housing fund, and a youth agency.
Cornwall told parliament the budget pushes their transformation agenda and banks on people driving progress instead of top-down government moves. The recurrent revenue hits EC$1.3 billion while capital spending comes in at EC$370.4 million.
The government wants to wrap up technical reviews on hydrocarbon potential and lock down exploration deals within 12...
Belize just got its first woman running a major political party after Tracy Panton took over the United Democratic Party and became opposition leader. She got sworn in after some pretty wild internal drama last year that had everyone thinking the whole thing might collapse.
Panton called the moment bittersweet because her late husband Herbert was not there to see it happen. She said people know she leads with integrity and heart, and her main job is pulling the party back together across all the regions. She has been in politics for about ten years after getting elected to represent Albert in the House of Representatives.
The new leader has a shadow cabinet to build and a central executive committee to set up. She promised a press...
Haiti's transition council just pushed through an electoral law that's supposed to get presidential voting back on track after almost a decade without one. The nine-member group approved the framework despite three voting members skipping out, and observers think those no-shows were trying to tank the whole thing to stay in power longer and boot the current prime minister.
The country hasn't had a presidential election since 2016, when Jovenel Moïse won before getting assassinated at his house. The new law still needs to get published in the official gazette before anything can move forward, but analysts are saying this doesn't actually fix the security nightmare or make elections realistic anytime soon.
Police grabbed five people after a 27-year-old DJ turned up dead in a flooded pit in Katakwi. The victim got identified as Patrick Elungat, and cops say the whole thing went down over some relationship drama with a woman who also got arrested.
The suspects are Emmanuel Omongin, Stephen Obungan, who rides boda-boda, Betty Oboliale, someone called Kavin, and two stage conductors named Ijado and Okiror. Regional commander SP Ibrahim Saiga said they're still hunting for more people connected to the case, and the investigation is still rolling.
