The Organization of American States (OAS), through the Executive Secretariat (ES), of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), inaugurated today the 3rd and last two-day regional training workshop on Monitoring and Evaluation of Drug Treatment Courts (DTCs) in Bridgetown, Barbados. The workshop involved officials of the justice area, health sector and treatment areas, including the Chief Justices of Belize and Barbados. Representatives that attended the workshop came from 4 countries of the Caribbean Region (Barbados, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago) and Canada.

The OAS representative in Barbados, Mr. Francis McBarnette, noted that for Barbados this training provides the DTC teams in the country with an important resource, since it is crucial to have evidence of the work being carried out during the process of implementation of DTCs.

For his part, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to Barbados, Aruna Amirthanayagam, said that the United States is a big supporter of DTCs in this region, and is pleased to support this program along with Canada.

Angela Crowdy, Assistant Executive Secretary of CICAD, stressed the importance of monitoring and evaluation, which is seen as a priority for CICAD, in order to strengthen and expand the DTC programme across the Hemisphere “generating evidence which will allow us to demonstrate, over time, that the objectives have been achieved.”

ES-CICAD will have a Manual for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of DTC ready by February, 2015. This will include an external evaluation of the project as a whole, so that findings can benefit the execution of future activities and related policy decisions.