Fayval Williams, a woman with the midas touch

Failure seems to have an allergy to the political career of Minister of Education, Youth and Information, the Honourable Fayval Williams.

That career has been littered with a number of firsts and she has turned those firsts into stories of success since that.

It seems wherever she goes success has followed, beginning with her school life.

Hailing from St Catherine, Williams is the seventh of nine children for parents James and Myrtle Johnston, the education minister boarded with another family so she could attend Ferncourt High School, well away from the comforts of home but blanched those challenges to achieve academic success.

Williams tertiary education had to wait after she ended high school and landed a job at the Bank of Nova Scotia where she worked as a teller for three years.  Higher education was still on her mind though and she travelled to the United States where a Masters in Business Administration with a focus on finance and her accreditation as a Chartered Financial Analyst from the Wharton Business School inside the University of Pennsylvania were waiting. Before that her Bachelor of Arts (cum laude) came in Economics from the prestigious Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The would-be politician then earned a place as an Information Systems Analyst for Morgan Stanley before going to work for Putnam Investments, Wellington Management Company, and Northwestern Mutual Life in the United States.

Returning to Jamaica, Williams served as executive director of Kingston Properties, as a senior manager at the Jamaica Money Market Brokers, and  consulted for the Financial Services Commission.

It wouldn’t be long before her influence as a change maker and her knowledge of finance on a macro level would put her in touch with politics, becoming caretaker of the St Andrew Eastern constituency back in 2015.

Almost a year to the date she became caretaker, Williams was sworn in as a Member of Parliament for the same constituency.

Her rise through the ranks of the Jamaica Labour Party since that time has been noticeable, but more than that, understandable.

Her first call of duty when she was appointed State Minister in the Ministry of Finance to work alongside Audley Shaw and Rudyard Spencer was to rid the government of the policy of drawing from the National Housing Trust to help budget financing.

It was a notable change.

She also made noteworthy contributions to the Pensions (Public Service) Act where a contributory scheme was made for the public sector.

She was also the person behind the first murmurings of a need for Jamaica to implement a national identification system.

And elicited help from the government for members of the Small Business Association on the event that the organisation created an implementation team to work alongside the government in coming up with strategies for growth and development.

Having achieved all that, as the first woman to be appointed to represent a finance ministry in Jamaica, it is no wonder she has drawn accolades and her resounding victory at the polls in 2020 came as no surprise.

Williams also sat on the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee and piloted three bills that allowed for tax exemption for listed companies using the share buyback option. Those bills, the Transfer Tax (Amendment) Act, the Income Tax (amendment) Act, and the Stamp Duty (Amendment) Act, were credited with driving more persons to the Jamaica Stock Exchange.

It is also no wonder that in 2017 Businesssuite Magazine named Williams the number one CEO in the Caribbean for the previous year.

Such a busy woman has Williams been, that she has even had a stint as chairman of popular media house, Nationwide News Network, and is co-founder of film animation Company ReelRock GSW.

Lately, having seen the impact on her life education has had, Williams has charged headlong into an education ministry significantly hamstrung by the attempts to slow the impact of COVID-19.

But with the track record she has boasted to date, there is nobody betting against her coming out at the other end of these massive challenges, smelling like roses.