P.C.C. Held Public Consultations with Wide Cross Section of Belize

While the Commission has its financial challenges, it still managed to reach a wide cross section of the community, including the ones that do not have access to technology or to the two volumes of the summary of the Constitution that they continue to disseminate. Chanona told News Five that they had originally put aside their public outreach program from June to December of last year, but that it went on for two months beyond that because of the need to reach the remote areas. All in all, he said, the coverage they were able to make was significant. In the coming months, the commission will prepare and present a report that reflects what it captured in the public consultations and outreach.

 

Anthony Chanona, Chairman, People’s Constitution Commission

“We visited, of the two hundred and six villages, over seventy percent of those villages in Toledo alone where fifty-four villages are.  I would say we sensitized one hundred percent because we went directly to thirteen villages and indirectly right over there at the Father Ring Parish Hall, thanks to the efforts of Commissioner Christina Coc. We were able to meet with the Toledo Alcalde’s Association and that is forty-one members. So we distributed these books and we sensitized our nation. We directly engage with over twenty-two thousand persons and we issued over ten thousand survey instruments, over three hundred thousand Digicel text blasts and one hundred and twenty-six thousand smart text blasts. We went all the way into the diaspora, but all that needed to be captured into some format of a tool of education, because when this effort is finished, the legacy that we all aspire to leave as a P.C.C is a tool that would create an agenda. The importance of our Belize Constitution, and the importance of having knowledge. of the way we govern ourselves. And now we’re in the process of trying to match what the people said. To a recommendation and where that effort will lead is what we want to do is develop an interim report.  So we will take these next months of June, July, August, September to create the recommendations based on the people’s responses. How do we take all that they said, from the highest percentages of priorities to the lowest, put them into some constitutional format. If it fits, is it a recommendation that will fit in the Constitution? Or is it something that is aspirational? I would like it to fit, but it’s not of a constitutional nature. And then, because we want to be able to call this effort the People’s Constitution of Belize. We are going to release in October what is titled an Interim Report and what the Interim Report will have is basically a summary of all recommendations  and we are going to put it back into the twenty-three stakeholders  of which the media is one  and we’re going to have hopefully truly media public outreach for the people of Belize to be able to see what  we saying we heard you say and to see if in fact we documented or heard properly.”