By 2050, fully a quarter of Caribbean people will be 60 and over.
When we look out our windows, instead of children running about the place, we'll be seeing seniors. Are we ready for this? Do we have the health care and community services to deal with the new reality?
The book Ageing in the Caribbean, edited by Dr Joan Rawlins and Dr Nicole Alea, raises these pertinent questions, and many others. The launch took place on January 29 at UWI, St Augustine, hosted by the Institute for Gender and Development Studies.
In the book's first chapter, Dr Rawlins educates us on how much our life expectancy has improved. Whereas in 1911, a Caribbean person was expected to live to just about 40 years, by 1960, this had leaped to 60-plus years, and by 2007, it was around 70, she reports.
156,000 T&T senior citizens
Today in T&T, older people (60 years and over) represent fully 12 per cent of our population, or 156,000 people, according to the Division of Ageing's Web site on February 6 which cited 2010 Central Statistical Office figures. That's a number too large to be ignored, states Dr Rawlins.
The book Ageing in the Caribbean shares valuable research from 12 scholars from around the region, including T&T, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, the Bahamas and Suriname. The 156-page book covers a wide span of issues: from grandmothers obliged to support adult children and grandchildren; to the challenges of maintaining quality of life when you live longer; to issues of affordable health care, protection from abuse, the loneliness experienced by too many old people, and the need for accessible, interesting programmes to encourage healthy, active ageing.
Active seniors want more services
Not all older people are frail, dependent or in need. The book includes research that many older people are still active, wanting to do meaningful activities rather than sit like zombies and watch television.
Many want more opportunities for life-long learning specifically geared to their own age group, whether it's learning to play the pan, learning about computers, or learning new hobbies like vegetable gardening, fish-keeping or crafts. And as Bernice Dyer-Regis states in Chapter Ten–"Never too old to learn"–seniors want to be actually asked what they're interested in. The problem is, no-one asks them–an example of ageism, or prejudice against older people, effectively rejecting and devaluing them, and excluding them from any useful input into state-funded programmes for seniors.
Senior citizens can have a lot to contribute, the book argues, if we're serious about building a more intergenerational community life–something that's declined as families have changed, become smaller or led by single parents, and as women have entered the workplace, often leaving a void in caregiving for older parents or grandparents. The challenge may be to reinvent a more inclusive family and community life suited to our current lifestyles, which bridges the generations, and also actively involves older people rather than ignoring them, as argued by Kenneth Niles in the book's last chapter.
As Dr Rawlins said at the launch, people should not be penalised for "having the audacity to outlive the life expectancy" that the planners of yesteryear predicted for them.
Our ageing population has far-reaching implications for how we organise our societies: from financial survival of the elderly, to health and family care, to using better indices of measurement to inform our development funding decisions to embrace senior citizens–whether at their homes, in health centres or in creating more intergenerational opportunities for meaningful living.
Dr Jennifer Rouse: Governance style can block good ageing programmes
Dr Jennifer Rouse enlivened the January 26 launch of the new book Ageing in the Caribbean with some refreshingly frank opinions about the challenges of enacting progressive ageing programmes at State level.
Dr Rouse is Director of the Division of Ageing in the Ministry of People and Social Development, and is a passionate advocate for the rights of seniors. She herself never started college until age 43, and earned a BA in Social Work and Africana Studies, a Masters in Public Policy in Ageing Issues, and a PhD in Public Policy, all at the University of Maryland, before moving to lead the Division of Ageing in 2004.
"Style of governance...can stymie implementation of an ageing policy," she said at the book launch, which took place at UWI, hosted by the Institute for Gender and Development Studies.
Senior staff in a ministry who may be candidates for ageism (prejudice against the elderly), for instance, can block projects, she said.
Dr Rouse remarked that in her 11 years working as Director of the Division of Ageing, she's experienced five ministers, six permanent secretaries, and about four deputy permanent secretaries, so she's had to learn how to "navigate the waters."
"I've already learned how to shelve programmes I had in mind, to bring it down to what I consider do-able," she said.
She said in T&T, there seems to be a disparity between how politicians define success in an ageing policy (they often measure it by how many are lining up for various services), and how policy analysts would define success (eg, how many clients are being used). Different measurements are being used, which is a problem, she said.
We should be looking at targeting the correct groups, said Dr Rouse; we don't delineate between the rich or the poor elderly, for instance, or local T&T seniors versus tourist seniors, in allocating free state services.
Dr Rouse said the book Ageing in the Caribbean was "meaty, informative... and areas covered were spot-on." She gave a thorough and favourable review of the book in her speech at the UWI book launch.
Older retirement ages?
Dr Rouse commented that as people live longer, the whole question of retiring at 65 may need to be revised; today's world of contract work is not age-based, she observed. "We need to go on (working), maybe to 70, because it is largely an economic issue..."
"...But then I remembered Paris nearly burned again (referring to the 2010 pension reform strikes), when they wanted to increase retirement age from 65 to 67... but the burning didn't come from the elders, it came from youth," who saw this as seniors usurping their space, she commented.
Dr Rouse referred to T&T's Consolidated Fund which pays for grants to seniors in T&T, commenting that nothing is free, and that any grants to seniors mean another group of people would be worse off. She gave an example of free bus passes to seniors, which many were using, and asked whether PTSC was receiving any money from the Ministry of Social Development. The subsidy amounts to millions of dollars, she said.
She referred to the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, the framework set by the international community in 2002 as a blueprint for national responses to ageing populations. But countries in the Caribbean which signed on have been slow to implement recommendations, she said.
Children having children � andstressing out grandparents
Dr Rouse referred to the phenomenon of many grandparents these days being called on to parent grandchildren, providing unpaid domestic care–which has a financial cost. The age group 19 � 59 in T&T, she said, which is supposed to be the money-earning one, is also the one most affected by HIV/Aids, incarceration, car accidents, unemployment, divorce, drug abuse and migration–and all this can affect grandparents, who may have parenting thrust upon them. It's like a reversal of roles, she said, where the employable population is not necessarily the one providing support, whereas those who should be enjoying their retirement may find they have new responsibilities.
Dr Rouse observed that the typical age for grandparents is becoming younger: instead of the silver-haired, gnarled faces of yore, some of today's grandparents can be as young as 25 or 30–due to girls as young as thirteen or even ten years old having children, who in turn have children.
Unique ageing in Tobago
On a different note, she noted that in Tobago, the older people seem much healthier than in Trinidad, because the Tobago seniors were eating healthy fresh fish ("straight from the sea to the pot") and fresh home-grown food: this has 80-year-olds looking like they are 50, she said. She commented that Tobago, because it is smaller, decentralised and more homogeneous (Afro-centric), has had a totally different approach to ageing than Trinidad, which merits study.
In reflecting on the book's chapter, "Never Too Old to Learn," written by Bernice Dyer-regis, Dr Rouse said the Division of Ageing has teamed up with the Ministry of Science and Technology to provide courses on ICT for seniors–and these courses are oversubscribed.
"They want to learn the computerisation so that they could connect–not only with relatives, like their grandchildren and so on, but also connect with goods and services. They shop online–for instance, with Amazon."
Dr Rouse agreed with the views of the last chapter–"The Aged, a New Power for Development"–saying that planning for intergenerational development is key.
"We cannot alienate seniors; we have to work towards a synergy with them."
The editors:
�2 Dr Joan Rawlins is a medical sociologist who worked as a senior lecturer in UWI's Faculty of Medical Sciences in St Augustine from 1996-2012. She has a BSc and an MSc in Sociology and a PhD in Development Studies. Originally from Jamaica, she has published on issues including the health service, domestic violence and women's health. She was part of the committee which developed T&T's 2007 national policy on aging.
�2 Dr Nicole Alea is a psychology lecturer at UWI, St Augustine, who currently directs the Adult Development and Ageing Lab in T&T. Before UWI she was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She has a PhD in psychology, and has published on topics including psychological wellbeing, autobiographical memory and emotional development.
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