World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank Collaborate to Provide Major Assistance for Resilience Building in Barbados and Caribbean

By Marlon Madden

Barbados and other countries in the Caribbean and Latin America are in line to get major assistance from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in securing funding and implementing programmes to build resilience in several areas.

On Thursday, the presidents of both financial institutions signed a four-year agreement, cementing a pledge made two months ago during a joint trip to Peru and Jamaica, to collaborate on three priority areas on which to scale up financing for development in the Caribbean and Latin America – protection of the Amazon and its people, climate resilience, and digitisation to improve education.

During a fireside chat on Thursday under the topic Strengthening Collaboration to Maximise Development Impact, President of the World Bank Ajay Banga and President of the IDB Ilan Goldfajn said the time had come for the Caribbean and Latin America to have access to trillions of dollars instead of millions, in order to achieve development goals.

In addition to providing better debt repayment options, the two institutions will help raise funds to assist Latin American and Caribbean countries in building resilience in the areas identified.

Recalling that he joined Prime Minister Mia Mottley in Paris recently in discussing matters relating to the climate crisis, Banga said “it is important to me and to her”.

“It’s not only debt repayments that we have announced, it is also having financing available – whether through insurance or deferred drawdown options, things that the bank has been doing in different countries. The question is, can we scale them, can we learn from each other and can we do more together? That is the idea,” he said.

Other areas they discussed but are not currently pursuing are digitisation for health care and governments, as well as financial inclusion, among others.

They explained that through the memorandum of understanding, both institutions would collaborate in the areas of planning and implementation of programmes and activities, research, training and dissemination of information.

Banga said if the institutions were able to help countries shift some risks associated with various projects, “then we remove an unnecessary friction point in attracting private capital and that is what we are trying to do”.

“We need all shoulders at the wheel. We need concessional capital from philanthropists and richer countries. We need the private sector to come in for the right reasons, not that they shouldn’t make money but come in for the right reasons and with the right risk profile. We need multilateral banks to work together [and] we need governance in countries to work well,” said Banga.