Improving Oversight and Accountability One Island at a Time

Challenges are nothing new to islanders. Living on small dots of land in the vast Pacific and the Caribbean Oceans, the people of the U.S.-affiliated insular areas have been caught in the path of typhoons, hurricanes, tsunamis, wars, and the ups and downs of tourism-based economies.

While Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands have been territories of the United States for some 100 years, they did not have self-governing elections until the 1970s. In the 1980s, the insular group expanded