 The World Bank midterm review and second in-person meeting for 2023 for the St. Lucia Human Capital Resilience Project, HCRP monitoring and evaluation phase, has gotten underway. The four-day October 3-6 2023 high-level review brings together officials of the World Bank, the Ministry of Equity, Social Justice and Empowerment, the Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology and Vocational Training and other affiliated government units. As part of their deliberations, officials began taking stock of the current achievements and challenges of the HCRP, with the goal of arriving at shared conclusions. Permanent Secretary attached to the Ministry of Equity, Dr. Sharmin Hippolyte-Manuel informed the gathering that her ministry was pacing well ahead in delivering on the HCRP's many project components. For us at the Ministry of Equity, the HCRP has delivered. We have achieved an updated social protection policy and action plan, a strategy for graduation from social assistance in St. Lucia, an operation manual to facilitate the harmonization of the public assistance program and the could-may-setly-see, a communication and advocacy strategy to support the efforts towards strengthening the social protection system in St. Lucia and the list goes on. P.S. Hippolyte-Manuel said next on the list of deliverables for her ministry in relation to the Human Capital Resilience Project was the design and eventual implementation of the social information system, CIS. Towards the end of the project in 2025, a comprehensive report on poverty in St. Lucia would have been prepared using data from the 2023-2024 survey of living conditions. The midterm review also examined progress at meeting the project development objectives and whether these could be retained or needed adjusting. We know all of this is getting towards improving the standard of living, economic improvement, economic growth for our island. And coming out of our session this week, I'm expecting that a lot of things are going to be clearer, that we would have had the opportunity to hash out the challenges that we were experiencing, that we can recognize the progress that we would have made over the past two and a half years, and we can chart the way forward for the next steps in this project. Once we have design and the issues with design of the project, we look at how the implementation arrangement has been working with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Equity. And we want to see if there is some streamlining, if we want to have some kind of a new staffing arrangement. What is the way in which we can enhance the implementation? Two other key areas down for review were compliance on financial management and procurement issues and progress towards safeguard aspects, including implementation of grievances and redress mechanisms for the project and the public assistance program, PAP. The Human Capital Resilience Project has been executed under a World Bank loan of $20 million and will conclude in April 2025.