Minister Francourt impressed by ASP employees and operations

Employment Department

Newly appointed Minister for Employment and Social Affairs, Patricia Francourt, yesterday conducted a familiarisation visit at the Agency for Social Protection (ASP), expressing her satisfaction at the way in which the institution is operating and fulfilling its mandate of providing assistance and administering certain benefits and programmes.

Minister Francourt, who was welcomed by acting chief executive Roma Edmond, commenced her visit at the Accounts department, followed by the other divisions, namely, Administration and Human Resource, the Registry department, Senior Benefits and Welfare Operations, and the customer service department whereby she was informed of the various services offered and the day-to-day running of the agency, in addition to interacting with employees and listening to their concerns.

“I have been very impressed with what I saw today. From outside, even though we are aware of the agency, we are not entirely sure of its role. And I was not even sure that there are almost 80 plus employees working here, so to see all these sections and how the different divisions come together, impressed me a lot. And this gives me insight, as it is not a domain that I have been involved much in, so to see all the sections and how they work, is amazing,” she said.

“These people are committed in the work that they are doing. You know, another thing that impressed me is that I see a lot of females in this domain, I have been told there are only 9 male employees, so we have a lot of strong females in the domain,” Minister Francourt remarked after the visit.

Perhaps one of the highlights of the visit for Minister Francourt, was the opportunity to interact with the many young employees and trainees on different government-financed programmes including My First Job at the agency.

“As you saw, I interacted a lot with the youths, the number of youths here, really impressed me. Youths in employment, as opposed to unemployment, and I gave them the opportunity to share a message to the other youths out there. To me this is encouraging, the youths are in employment and they are learning, even if it’s not the domain for which they studied, they are ready to re-learn and re-train and they see how what they are learning is transferrable,” Minister Francourt added.

Having been given a general overview of the running and operations of the agency, the way forward is to further discuss how to improve the agency and initiate reforms, Minister Francourt added.

She proposed that the major challenges ASP faces is space constraints for the 80 plus staff employed by the organisation, as well as challenges with the general public who it offers services to.

Indeed, Mrs Edmond highlighted the need to modernise ASP’s systems and payment processes. As such, the agency has been encouraging its around 30,100 beneficiaries to opt for electronic bank transfers, so as to reduce the risk of storing such large quantities of cash onsite and as a means to relive the office of the long queues typically seen on payment days.

“Cash payments and bank transfers is one of our major challenge, on account of the large amount of money that we are dealing with, it is risky. We are sending a message that everyone who is receiving some benefit from the agency to open a bank account to facilitate payments. The process is easy as the agency can produce a letter to be presented to the bank informing them of the benefits, so the beneficiary does not have to contribute,” Mrs Edmond noted.

In addition to digitising payment processes, ASP plans on digitising internal processes and records, in a bid to make the agency more efficient and effective.

ASP is the payment body for over 30 categories of benefits, which are further categorised into three categories. The types of assistance include the social safety net, commonly referred to as welfare assistance, statutory benefits as well as other approved schemes with partner organisations, such as the department of Social Services, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education.

The accompanying photos show some highlights of Minister Francourt’s visit to the ASP yesterday.