LocationsWhat an independent evaluation of UNDP's Caribbean programmes reveals about operating in countries that are both relatively prosperous and highly vulnerable.
Beyond income: what the Caribbean paradox asks of UNDP
October 15, 2026
Grenada Levera National Park
UNDP Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean/Shani Leacock
In the Jamaican parishes of Clarendon, Manchester and St. Elizabeth, our evaluation team met women, including women with disabilities, for whom recovery support after earlier disasters was often the only help available to restore their livelihoods. Months after our visit, Hurricane Melissa struck the region. And although Jamaica is classified as an upper-middle-income country, the hurricane’s economic losses were estimated at nearly 57 percent of GDP.
This is the Caribbean paradox: relatively high incomes coexist with structural vulnerabilities that income measures largely obscure. A single hurricane can erase years of investment, disrupt livelihoods and essential services, and put hard-won development gains under renewed pressure. In 2017, Hurricane Maria caused losses equivalent to more than 200 percent of Dominica's GDP. Behind such figures are households in what our evaluation describes as a “grey zone”: neither poor enough to qualify for assistance nor sufficiently secure to withstand the next shock.
These vulnerabilities are not explained by island geography alone. Small and concentrated economies, dependence on external markets and the high costs of serving dispersed populations interact with development trajectories shaped by colonial legacies and patterns of economic dependence that continue to condition countries' choices. Still, Caribbean countries have built substantial institutional capacities and ambitious development agendas. The challenge is often not a lack of capacity, but sustaining progress when recurring shocks divert resources from long-term development investments.
The Caribbean islands SIDS face similar natural hazard exposure, but their capacity to cope varies widely
Natural hazard exposure and lack of disaster risk reduction coping capacity, INFORM 2025 (0–10, higher = worse)
At the United Nations General Assembly in September 2026, Caribbean leaders renewed calls to look beyond national income as a measure of vulnerability. They argued that countries facing recurring climate shocks and other structural constraints often face higher borrowing costs, effectively paying a premium for vulnerabilities they did little to create. Several pointed to the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index as a way to complement income-based measures when considering access to concessional finance. Their message was not simply about how vulnerability is recognized or measured, but whether countries have a fair opportunity to finance their own development.
For countries that have already achieved significant human development gains, protecting those gains and continuing to expand opportunities is as important as achieving them in the first place. For UNDP, this raises two questions. What does advancing human development require where relatively high incomes coexist with vulnerabilities that can repeatedly reverse development gains? And how should UNDP position itself in response?
Our subregional evaluation of UNDP's work across the Caribbean suggests that these conditions are changing what effective development cooperation looks like. Across the three UNDP Multi-Country Offices serving 19 countries and territories, UNDP remained a trusted and credible partner, but its relevance increasingly depended on what it could add to national capabilities rather than on substituting for them.
Beyond delivering projects: What the evaluation revealed about UNDP’s role
Across the contexts examined, a common lesson emerged: UNDP's value depended not only on what it delivered, but on what its engagement enabled. Its long-standing relationships and regional presence helped sustain important reforms, from justice and climate governance to disaster recovery.
Some of its most consequential contributions came when implementation became a means to something larger: helping institutions take reforms forward, connecting capabilities across countries, and mobilizing expertise and partnerships around shared challenges.
This took different forms across the subregion. In Trinidad and Tobago, work on justice and digital transformation increasingly combined implementation with technical expertise, convening and access to wider networks and knowledge. In Jamaica, longer-term engagement in justice, citizen security and climate governance produced some of the more durable results. Newer initiatives in both countries struggled to move beyond individual projects and pilots when financing, institutional ownership or continuity were weaker.
Some of UNDP's most consequential contributions came when implementation became a means to something larger: helping institutions take reforms forward, connecting capabilities across countries, and mobilizing expertise and partnerships around shared challenges.
For people, these differences were tangible: digitalization and new legal procedures reducing case backlogs and prison overcrowding, legal assistance reaching underserved communities, new opportunities to restore livelihoods, and national institutions better equipped to respond when disasters struck or new challenges emerged.
The Eastern Caribbean exposed another dimension of the same challenge. Sustaining meaningful engagement across numerous small states stretched limited capacities, and regional approaches proved most effective when linked to concrete reforms and institutions capable of carrying them forward. Regional cooperation was therefore not simply about efficiency or geographical reach. It allowed countries to pool capabilities, connect around common challenges and achieve a scale that national programmes could not easily achieve on their own.
In short, results were more durable when governments steered reforms, institutions assumed responsibility and regional cooperation provided capabilities that countries could not easily sustain alone.
A changing role, but an operating model still catching up
The evaluation also exposed a growing mismatch. UNDP's value proposition and programme offer were evolving faster than the operating and financing model supporting them. Delivery remained an important source of trust, but dispersed, project-based portfolios stretched limited capacities and left too little room for the technical depth and sustained partnerships needed to take promising initiatives further.
This became particularly apparent as Caribbean countries pursued new ambitions in digital transformation, renewable energy and sustainable finance. UNDP could open doors, test approaches and connect partners, but promising initiatives did not consistently grow into larger reforms or investments. Nor were the challenges shared across Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) matched by sufficiently connected expertise and partnerships across the three offices.
Turning what we know into what we do
The task is not to choose between delivery and strategy, but to use delivery as a platform for more lasting change both nationally and across the shared challenges facing Caribbean SIDS. The emerging debate on the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index and development finance could change how development partners assess financing needs and resilience challenges, and the evaluation suggests that UNDP is well placed to contribute. Across the Caribbean, progress often depended less on identifying solutions than on connecting institutions, expertise, partnerships and financing around shared challenges. UNDP's multi-country and regional presence, long-standing relationships and implementation experience remain important assets, particularly where countries seek to sustain reforms and expand their resilience to future shocks.
The evaluation points to three shifts:
- Work more as one Caribbean, connecting expertise across the three Multi-Country Offices and anchoring regional initiatives in Caribbean institutions capable of carrying them forward.
- Go deeper where UNDP adds distinctive value, sustaining the expertise and partnerships needed to move beyond individual projects towards institutional change.
- Connect promising ideas to finance and scale, working with governments, regional institutions and financial partners to take reforms and innovations beyond individual projects and into investment pathways.
These are not entirely new roles. UNDP already has many of the relationships, capabilities and implementation strengths on which to build. The challenge ahead is therefore not simply to do more, but to make more of what UNDP already knows, connects and enables. That means combining its implementation strengths with the technical expertise, partnerships, financing connections and regional reach needed to support more ambitious and sustained development pathways across the Caribbean.
For Caribbean countries, greater recognition of structural vulnerability, and financing systems that reflect it, could create new opportunities to invest in resilience and human development. For UNDP, the corresponding challenge is ensuring that its own ways of working are equipped to help countries make the most of those opportunities.
For the small entrepreneurs we met, and for households across the Caribbean living in that “grey zone,” this is far from abstract. It concerns whether they can rebuild their livelihoods, preserve hard-won progress and face the next shock with greater security. That is ultimately what looking beyond income should make possible: greater agency for Caribbean countries and their people to shape their own development futures.
Learn more in the full report
The full evaluation report and three executive summaries unpack UNDP’s contributions under the 2022-2026 country programmes for the three Caribbean multi-country offices,
