Above: Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe (Photo: OPM Haiti)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has launched a new measure aimed at fighting extreme poverty in the country, he announced on Tuesday.

Lamothe, joined by Social Affairs and Labour Minister Charles Jean Jacques and Minister for Human Rights and the Fight Against Extreme Poverty, said the plan aimed to reduce poverty and expand government intervention in that regard in Haiti by 2015.

“The Haitian people had to wait more than two centuries before a government came with a social programme covering all departments of the country,” Lamothe argue at the launch. “Poverty is not natural — it is men who create [it], and who will win.”

The plan was launched at the Royal Oasis hotel in Port-au-Prince’s Petion-Ville neighbourhood under the theme “Think and Fight for a Haiti Without Poverty.”

Jean Jacques, Haiti’s Social Affairs Minister, said the plan was an approach that tended “toward concrete results,” pointing to what he saw as an essential tool in the fight against poverty.

The Minister said the programme recommended, among other things, the establishment of a “social and inclusive social insurance system,” which would allow citizens to “benefit from certain services essential to their well-being.”