By Kimroy Bailey and Sherika Trott Bailey  |  Trott Bailey Family Civilization

October 13, 2026

Caribbean families are very good at making things work. Somebody knows who can fix the pump. Somebody has a cousin who can find transport. Grandma knows where to get a little food when money is tight. A mother rearranges her entire day because the water is off, a child is sick, or a journey that should be simple has become three separate errands. We admire this resourcefulness. But how much of a family’s life should be spent compensating for systems that were meant to serve it?

We are a Jamaican–Brazilian family raising three children in Bahia, Brazil, and building what we call the Trott Bailey Family Civilization. Our work has grown out of an ordinary family demand: a home, a neighbourhood and the services around them should make life easier to live. When those systems are poorly joined, families become the missing connection. They supply the unpaid planning, waiting, carrying, worrying and repair work.

The household is where the real service test happens

The Bahamas offers a useful way to think about this. Its 2022 census recorded 119,138 households, including 79,659 in New Providence. The distribution of homes across islands makes the final journey of food, equipment, care and transport especially important. A warehouse can be stocked, a port can be busy and a national plan can be funded while a family still faces a broken last step. [1]

Physical housing statistics alone do not tell us whether living in a home is easy. The Bahamas National Statistical Institute found that 1.4% of households met its 2022 definition of overcrowding, down from 2.4% in 2010. That is useful progress on a specific measure. It cannot tell us how long people spend arranging reliable water, what it costs them to keep a home functioning, or whether parents have enough time left to enjoy their children. Those conditions deserve to be measured too. [2]

A household has its own logistics chain. Food has to reach the kitchen, water has to reach the tap, clothes have to get clean and dry, children have to reach places safely, and a parent needs to know that someone can help when life becomes too heavy. Every weak link creates another task. Often that task lands on the person who is already doing the most at home.

Design the neighbourhood around living, not errands

We have been developing a different physical arrangement. Food production belongs throughout the neighbourhood, where it can be part of ordinary walking, children’s play, shared rest spaces and family learning. Water collection, storage and movement belong in the design of buildings and living ground from the beginning. Caring for children and elders needs its own places and people, close enough to families that using the service does not create another long journey.

In Prado, Bahia, our small planted strip beside the road has become a modest example of this direction. Children have learned to recognise banana plants; older neighbours have picked watermelons; mothers have taken pumpkins home. Nobody needed to pay for those harvests. We have not measured how much household food spending this has replaced. We have watched a piece of ground become productive, social and useful beyond the boundaries of one family.

The larger systems remain at the design and development stage. Our Compound Living approach distributes the functions of a family home among small, charming building bodies connected by verandas, paths, planted spaces and water routes. It lets sleeping, bathing, dressing, cooking and gathering have carefully designed places without reducing the land between them to empty decoration. The landscape participates in feeding, cooling and sheltering the household.

A small Abundance Scorecard test for The Bahamas

In the Trott Bailey Family Global Abundance Scorecard’s published 6 October 2026 snapshot, The Bahamas stood at 194th among 243 ranked profiles, scoring −70.8, with 88% research coverage. Its displayed GDP rank was 140th. These are scores from our own published evaluation framework, not an official national welfare index. The ranking changes as research and country profiles are updated. [3]

The negative result follows a deliberate baseline: a country cannot cross zero until it passes five access tests, which we call Money Gate 20. Food, housing and land, healthcare, transport, and water and energy each receive up to four points for whether life’s essentials remain accessible without payment barriers. The baseline asks more of a country than producing a large economy. It asks whether families can actually live from what that economy can provide. [3]

For The Bahamas, the immediate use of this lens is practical. Take housing and water together: how often must a family pay again, wait again or depend on an improvised arrangement to make a home work? Take food and transport together: when products reach the country, how much travel, expense and coordination still stand between them and a kitchen? The Scorecard is a way to press these questions, while census and household data should provide the independent evidence used to test the answers.

Measure the burden that disappears

The World Bank reported Bahamian GDP per person at about US$39,455 for 2024. It is an important description of the country’s economic scale, but a national average cannot show how a particular home functions on an ordinary Tuesday. [4] A practical family-life report could record time spent fetching or arranging services, interruptions to water or power, travel needed for essential care, reliable access to local food and the hours parents recover when a service is genuinely made simple.

This would help people assess public works and private development by the life they return. A new building may look impressive. A transport scheme may carry more passengers. Yet the deeper result is seen when a parent does not have to miss an afternoon with the children to complete three linked errands, when an elder can obtain what is needed without depending on favours, or when food is available to eat without a family having to weigh it against the rent.

The Caribbean already has strong cultures of family help, neighbours sharing and relatives stepping in for one another. We want the surrounding design to support that generosity instead of continually drawing on it to cover basic failures. Families have plenty of meaningful work of their own: raising children, caring for each other, growing things, learning, gathering, playing and enjoying the place where they live. We would like our children to inherit more of that life.