By Eddy Smith
Looking back on a conversation with a friend, I keep returning to the warning at its centre: unless St. Vincent and the Grenadines makes a serious turnaround, we are heading into decline. It was a sobering argument. Yet the longer I considered it, the more I wondered whether we had asked the question that should come before any verdict: what, exactly, would a turnaround look like?
Would we recognise it in another hotel, a busier airport, or a better road? Certainly, those can open opportunities. But what would they tell us about the child struggling to read, the household stretched by illness, or the young person who cannot see how honest effort leads to a decent living? A country’s achievements should reach into the lives of its people.
We also owe ourselves a fair account of how we arrived here. The 2021 eruption of La Soufrière and Hurricane Beryl in 2024 disrupted livelihoods and damaged infrastructure. These were blows to families, businesses, and public finances. Any serious conversation about our direction must acknowledge how much energy has gone into recovering ground we had already gained.
Even so, hardship alone cannot establish that a nation is declining. The World Bank reports that our economy grew by 3.7 per cent in 2025. Growth gives us something to build upon. The question is whether we are turning that activity into greater security, stronger skills, and opportunities that ordinary Vincentians can actually use.
Economist Amartya Sen offers a useful way of thinking about this: judge progress through the lives people can lead and the choices available to them. Bring that idea home. Can a school-leaver acquire a useful skill? Can a farmer reach a reliable buyer? Can an elderly person obtain care without exhausting the household’s resources? Those questions bring development within reach of everyday judgement.
What condition are we in to make use of opportunity?
PAHO’s country profile, using 2019 data, identifies cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer as the three leading causes of death and disability in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Behind those words are interrupted working lives, anxious families, and hours devoted to care. Illness can reduce a household’s income while increasing its expenses; across many households, the strain reaches employers, clinics, and the national budget.
Consider your own week. Is there room for movement, proper rest, and meals chosen with some care? Then consider the parent balancing food prices, transport costs, and long working hours. Personal responsibility becomes more practical when nutritious food is affordable, recreation is accessible, and healthcare is dependable. A national renewal must make good choices easier to sustain.
That brings us to another question: what are our daily habits preparing us to become?
Aristotle understood character as something developed through repeated actions. Applied to our circumstances, the lesson is demanding: reliability grows through keeping commitments; judgement grows through examining evidence; courage grows through doing what is right when approval is uncertain. The apprentice who practices carefully and the employer who honours an agreement are helping establish standards others can trust. Repetition gives those standards a life beyond speeches.
Where, then, are we directing our attention?
Picture a family together at home, each person absorbed in a separate screen. Or imagine a student who can repeat an online controversy but struggles to explain a paragraph. Technology offers extraordinary access to learning and enterprise. We should ask whether our use of it develops those possibilities. Reading with a child, learning a skill online, or checking a claim before forwarding it puts attention to work.
And what are we learning to produce?
A small country needs people who can solve problems: repair equipment, grow food consistently, manage accounts, care for patients, and create services others will purchase. Productivity means getting greater value from our effort and resources. Training must therefore connect with opportunities to practise, earn, improve, and eventually teach someone else.
Consider a farmer supplying a hotel. That relationship requires dependable quantities, suitable quality, transport, and timely payment. When it works, visitor spending can circulate through farms, wages, shops, and households. Encouraging local purchasing is one step; helping producers meet buyers’ requirements completes the connection. What would it take for more Vincentians to participate in the opportunities tourism creates?
Here my friend’s warning takes on a sharper meaning. We could expand an industry while leaving too many people unable to enter it. Public investment should therefore face questions about who gains, which skills are developed, and whether local enterprises become more capable. Every dollar committed also carries an opportunity cost: it cannot simultaneously finance another pressing need.
But can determination carry someone through every obstacle?
Consider the World Bank’s account of Malaika Watt, a shopkeeper on Union Island who had invested her savings in restocking her business shortly before Beryl swept it away. Her experience exposes the limits of telling people simply to work harder. Recovery requires effort, financing, functioning infrastructure, and institutions able to respond. The recovery programme’s combination of income support, temporary employment, and business assistance illustrates how public action can help people regain their footing.
The lesson extends beyond disasters. A capable person can still be held back by inaccessible credit, unreliable services, or unfair treatment. Individual initiative and effective institutions need each other. We should demand both, and examine whether our systems reward competence and allow people to recover from setbacks.
Would we apply that standard even when it inconveniences our own side?
A citizen asking how public money was spent is exercising responsibility. So is an official providing a clear answer. Whenever political loyalty excuses poor performance, we weaken the pressure to improve. Accountability becomes credible when the same questions follow every administration: what was promised, what was delivered, what did it cost, and what happens when the work falls short?
We might also ask where our capacity for cooperation goes between emergencies. After a disaster, the need for helping hands is unmistakable. During an ordinary week, a struggling pupil, an isolated older neighbour, or a young person seeking guidance can be easier to overlook. Imagine applying the same readiness to a reading group, an apprenticeship, or a community playing field. Renewal gains substance through organised, continuing effort.
Looking back, I now hear my friend’s argument as an invitation to examine what we are becoming. We can begin close to home: keep one neglected commitment, support a child’s learning, strengthen a useful skill, join others in solving a local problem. Before the week ends, choose one undertaking and involve someone else. Give it a time, a place, and someone who can depend on you to follow through.
Alongside those efforts, insist on public institutions that give effort a fair chance to succeed.
Then picture that child reaching adulthood here. What will we be able to place in their hands: skills, confidence, a country where they can build a life? Our answer is taking shape in decisions we make today. The next time the conversation turns to whether St. Vincent can turn around, we should have more than an opinion to offer.
We should have something underway.
And when our children ask what future this country holds, let us be able to show them where we have begun.
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