Jamaica Has Tried to Launch a Diaspora Bond for 14 Years. It Still Hasn’t

• Diaspora bond first proposed for 2012 Independence
• Israel and India raised billions this way
• Jamaica still hasn’t issued one
• 2018 World Bank report revived the idea

The Jamaican government and the World Bank first tried to launch a diaspora bond in 2012, aiming to tap into an estimated US$5.4 billion in annual diaspora savings in time for the country’s 50th Independence anniversary. World Bank economist Dilip Ratha urged Jamaica to keep expectations modest for a first offer, calling it a bridge-building exercise as much as a fundraising one. Fourteen years on, no bond has actually been issued.

The model exists and works elsewhere. Israel has sold diaspora bonds since the 1950s, raising close to US$40 billion over time. India issued them twice during genuine financial crises, in 1991 during a balance of payments crunch and again in 1998, both times successfully. The appeal for a government is real: diaspora bonds function as an alternative to costlier foreign borrowing, relying on what researchers call a patriotic discount, where expatriates accept a lower return than the open market would demand because they trust their home government and want to contribute.

Jamaica’s attempts kept stalling on design questions rather than lack of interest. Rohan Barnett, then executive director of the Financial Services Commission, argued in 2011 against an education-focused bond specifically, on the grounds that education spending generates no revenue stream to repay bondholders, and proposed instead a diaspora-managed investment fund targeting projects that could actually service debt. The government’s own 2012 push aimed at education and health spending ran into exactly that structural problem.

A 2018 World Bank report tried again, this time framing diaspora bonds as disaster risk financing, an instrument Jamaica could draw on quickly after a hurricane by redirecting or increasing diaspora remittance flows into public assistance. The report was explicit that any move in that direction needed a cost-benefit analysis first, not just enthusiasm.

In the years since, Jamaica’s diaspora engagement strategy has shifted toward a different, more direct mechanism: rather than a government bond, officials now push individual diaspora members toward buying private real estate directly, a pitch Prime Minister Andrew Holness repeated at the 2026 Diaspora Conference. That approach sidesteps the bond structuring problem entirely, individual purchases need no sovereign debt instrument, no repayment schedule, no patriotic discount calculation. It may also explain why, fourteen years after the idea was first floated, nobody in government is still actively pushing for the bond itself.

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