CARICOM Chairman Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley says the issue of the CDF and its management has “bedevilled the Community for some time.”
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados--So serious are the issues facing the region that its leaders have decided to restructure the Caribbean Community CARICOM Development Fund (CDF) to enable it to raise additional monies from individuals, companies, institutions, regional countries and extra-regional countries.
CARICOM Chairman Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said the issue of the CDF and its management was one that had “bedevilled the Community for some time,” noting that it was created as a way to assist disadvantaged countries, sectors and regions.
“Member states have committed to capitalising this Fund, but this will never be enough to do what needs to be done, particularly with all of the challenges that the region faces at this point in time … I outlined a number of them and we keep seeing new challenges as we did with the [novel coronavirus – Ed.] COVID-19 and to that extent, therefore, we feel strongly that we need to revisit the structure of the CARICOM Development Fund,” she said on the heels of the 31st Inter-sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government which her country hosted.
Mottley added that the restructuring would be long-term, explaining that the CDF would ultimately drive the development of regional institutions that had been taken over by technological developments which made them obsolete or incapable of being competitive.
As a result, she said a transition period was needed since a middle-developed country that was affected by a climatic or other event would require an injection of capital in order to stabilise it.
The CARICOM chairman noted that going forward, once the restructuring was done correctly, the Fund would be one of the key pillars of the integration movement, allowing leaders to deal with the disparities that exist as far as size and capacity were concerned and carrying all nations from the very large to the very smallest ones on the integration journey.
She opined that in any Single Market and Single Economy there would be winners and losers, pointing out that this decision by heads of government would “make a significant difference” to the region’s development.
At the end of the two-day summit, a number of agreements were also signed. Dominica signed the Protocol on Public Procurement and an agreement on the Return or Sharing of Recovered Assets; the British Virgin Islands signed an agreement for the establishment of the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine and other Health Professions; and St. Vincent and the Grenadines signed the Protocol on Public Procurement and Declaration of Intent to Provisionally Apply the Protocol on Public Procurement.
CARICOM Heads of Government will meet in St. Vincent and the Grenadines for their regular summit from July 2 to 3, but they have promised to confer before that date by teleconference. ~ Caribbean360 ~
