A Stronger, Fairer Future for St Helena: Government Sets Out New Vision Strategy
St Helena faces a complex set of interlinked social, economic, and environmental challenges that threaten the island’s long-term sustainability and the well-being of our community. Rising costs of living, an aging and declining population, labour shortages, fragile national infrastructure, and declining trust in institutions have eroded public confidence and reinforced a cycle of uncertainty and outward migration. These dynamics reinforce one another. Population decline reduces the labour force and tax base; weak systems undermine confidence; environmental degradation threatens water, food and health; and uncertainty drives outward migration.
The Government is developing its new Vision Strategy setting out a clear path to first stabilise and start to reverse these trends and build a fairer, more resilient, and forward-looking St Helena. Our vision is for a community where every person is valued, has the opportunity to live a healthy and fulfilling life, and where families, businesses, and the environment can thrive together.
Our vision is for a fair, inclusive, more resilient and forward-looking St Helena, confident in its future, responsible in its stewardship and united in purpose to become a sustainable thriving community with people at its heart.
This vision recognises that rebuilding confidence will require phased reform, and a clear focus on what is affordable and what can be delivered sustainably within our financial and institutional capacity. It also recognises the increasing costs of service delivery, as a result of our aging population and shrinking worforce as well as impact of increasing international costs, for example supply of pharmaceuticals. This means we need to look carefully at the sustainability of our current range of service delivery.
The strategy is built around three core priorities shaped by the voices and experiences of St Helenians across the island:
- Stabilising the Population and Labour Market: Creating conditions for people to stay, return, and contribute through fulfilling careers, skills development, and fair access to services.
- Protecting Living Standards and Core Services: Ensuring immediate support for those under pressure, while reforming health, social care, education, and infrastructure for long-term sustainability.
- Enabling Sustainable, Locally Driven Growth: Diversifying the economy, investing in digital and physical infrastructure, and developing ecosystem services whilst safeguarding the environment as a strategic asset to create an enabling environment for accelerate opportunities for growth.
Key actions include aligning education and workforce planning with current and future needs, commitment to partnership with the community in preventative healthcare, affordable utilities, and public service reform. The strategy also recognises the need for incremental tax and revenue reform, improved compliance, and disciplined public financial management. Alongside supporting growth and new intiatives.
Implementation will be phased, with clear milestones and measurable outcomes. Government will communicate openly about progress and constraints, adapt as needed based on evidence and lived experience, and work in partnership across portfolios, communities, business, and civil society.
Government is clear that St Helena cannot only tax its way out of structural challenges by increasing the burden on wages in a shrinking population. Long-term sustainability requires a broader and fairer revenue base, improved compliance, and growth-linked revenues, alongside disciplined public financial management.
By focusing first on stabilising people’s lives and rebuilding trust, while strengthening the foundations of our economy, services, and environment, we will restore confidence and set St Helena on a more secure and hopeful path, step by step, and together.
Key Priorities 2026–2029
Nine cross government priorities guide the strategy
1. Stabilise the population and labour market
2. Protect health and social care and improve prevention outcomes
3. Reform education and build the future workforce
4. Reduce the cost of living through investment in utilities and infrastructure
5. Enable sustainable, locally driven economic growth
6. Grow revenues fairly
7. Reform and strengthen the public service
8. Safeguard the environment as a strategic asset
9. Protect living standards during transition
These priorities are aligned with a set of Strategic Outcomes that are underpinned by Strategic Objectives, the delivery of which is monitored to track progress against them from a value for money and benefits realisation perspective. Importantly they reflect that successful achievement requires cross portfolio partnerships because of resource limitations and the interconnections and interdependencies inherent in bringing about changes. The ten Strategic Outcomes form the bridge between the Vision and Budget and link directly to the FAM investment requests.
Each outcome guides the various work streams and activities across the different sectors, for example:
- Health: stabilising hospital flow, reducing overseas referrals, expanding residential care, developing sustainable financing models.
- Education: COBIS standards, primary reorganisation, SEND reform, post-16 pathways.
- Utilities: renewable energy transition, telecoms regulation, water security.
- Growth: tourism development, Impact Company Registry, financial services reform, agriculture and fisheries revival.
- Public Service: digital transformation, workforce planning, performance management.
Over the coming weeks, the Government will discuss the draft strategy more widely with focused stakeholder groups and invite open discussion to help identify any remaining gaps, including issues relevant to groups we have not yet reached. Our aim is to finalise and publish the strategy in April, by which time we expect to know our budgetary aid settlement, and we will review it annually to ensure it remains responsive to the island’s changing need.
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