Nine years ago, IDB In­vest was “recre­at­ed” with the in­tent to place more fo­cus on the Caribbean.

IDB In­vest is a pri­vate sec­tor arm of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB), which op­er­ates as a group in 26 coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean.

Typ­i­cal­ly geared to­ward de­vel­op­men­tal projects, the IDB pri­mar­i­ly works with gov­ern­ments to achieve its goals.

How­ev­er, last year the Wash­ing­ton DC-based IDB in­creased its in­vest­ment in the re­gion.

CEO of IDB In­vest, James Scriv­en, told the Busi­ness Guardian in an in­ter­view on Mi­crosoft Teams on Tues­day, that the IDB In­vest’s im­pact in the Caribbean had grown over that nine-year pe­ri­od with in­vest­ments in­creas­ing from US$50 to US$60 mil­lion a year to over US$1 bil­lion last year.

There are in­di­ca­tors that in­vest­ments may in­crease even fur­ther this year.

“We do US$10 bil­lion a year (in in­vest­ments) across the 26 coun­tries, and last year, we did 13 per cent of our in­vest­ments over the en­tire con­ti­nent in the Caribbean coun­tries. And that’s about US$1.2 bil­lion to US$1.3 bil­lion. Our share­hold­ers have re­quest­ed that we do at least 10 per cent of our busi­ness in the nine Caribbean coun­tries who are share­hold­ers of IDB in­vest. This year, for the first time in our his­to­ry, we went be­yond our 10 per cent man­date and we did 13 per cent. In Trinidad, we have a long-stand­ing re­la­tion­ship with pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies across many fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions and con­glom­er­ates,” said Scriv­en.

Scriv­en was ap­point­ed CEO of IDB In­vest nine years ago, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly done work in Caribbean as part of the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion, where he worked for 15 years.

The IDB has 48 share­hold­ers/mem­ber coun­tries who in­ject cap­i­tal which the in­sti­tu­tion lever­ages through is­suances in lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al cap­i­tal mar­kets. T&T, Scriv­en said, is an im­por­tant share­hold­er of the IDB.

Last month, IDB In­vest agreed to a US$150 mil­lion deal with Massy Hold­ings. Scriv­en con­firmed that it was the sin­gle, largest deal IDB In­vest had done in the Caribbean to date.

“The largest deal that we have ac­tu­al­ly done is the Massy trans­ac­tion. As I said, it’s a US$150 mil­lion deal with Massy Hold­ings and Massy In­te­grat­ed Re­tail. This cov­ers Trinidad, Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica. It’s a pack­age that does US$90 mil­lion of long-term fund­ing to up­grade cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture, boost­ing a strate­gic ex­pan­sion plan and US$60 mil­lion of trade fi­nance pro­grammes to en­hance in­tra-re­gion­al trade and sup­ply chain plat­forms. And, as I said, it cov­ers a num­ber of coun­tries. Its main ac­tiv­i­ty is in Trinidad, but it al­so cov­ers Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica and ex­pand­ing in­to places like Colom­bia,” he ex­plained.

An­oth­er sig­nif­i­cant deal done in Trinidad re­lat­ed to the pro­vi­sion of hous­ing as IDB In­vest fa­cil­i­tat­ed a TT$300 mil­lion bond is­sued by Home Mort­gage Bank for hous­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Scriv­en said IDB In­vest is of the view that there is sig­nif­i­cant po­ten­tial in the Caribbean, but em­pha­sised the need to up­grade phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture to make it more re­silient to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. He added the in­sti­tu­tion is al­so plac­ing fo­cus on re­new­able en­er­gy, agribusi­ness, and tourism de­vel­op­ment.

IDB In­vest has in­vest­ed about US$500 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly in dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture to pro­vide in­ter­net ac­cess in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean with Scriv­en stat­ing it had made a sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment in Guyana to ex­pand dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion.

Scriv­en said the or­gan­i­sa­tion has al­so been work­ing to in­crease its pres­ence in the Caribbean.

“Eight, nine years ago, the gov­er­nors de­cid­ed to put at the top of our pri­or­i­ty list the nine Caribbean coun­tries that we con­sid­er as small is­land coun­tries. We call them SNIs in­ter­nal­ly. It was a de­ci­sion tak­en that we would sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease our phys­i­cal pres­ence and our in­volve­ment in the Caribbean. We went from hav­ing one per­son work­ing in the Caribbean, to now when we have more than 10 peo­ple,” said Scriv­en, ex­plain­ing there are plans to have 25 peo­ple in the re­gion in the next three to four years.

Part of this ad­just­ment, he ex­plained, in­clud­ed bring­ing the IDB In­vest gen­er­al man­ag­er to Trinidad.

“I’d like to re­in­force the idea of how im­por­tant the Caribbean is for IDB in­vest and the IDB group, and that’s why, in par­tic­u­lar, we de­cid­ed to have our most se­nior pro­fes­sion­al cov­er­ing the Caribbean, and that per­son will be an­nounced in the next few weeks. He or she will be based in Port-of-Spain and cov­er­ing the en­tire Caribbean for us,” said Scriv­en.

“We do have a pres­ence of IDB, a gen­er­al man­ag­er in Ja­maica. We have de­cid­ed to have (that per­son) in Port-of-Spain, the pres­ence of the gen­er­al man­ag­er of IDB and best pri­vate sec­tor for the Caribbean. So the se­nior head of the Caribbean will be based in Trinidad and we are in the process of re­cruit­ing that per­son.”

In par­tic­u­lar, Scriv­en said he had par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est in the de­vel­op­ment of To­ba­go as an in­ter­na­tion­al tourism des­ti­na­tion.

He said, “A big fo­cus that I per­son­al­ly have is to help de­vel­op To­ba­go as an in­ter­na­tion­al tourism des­ti­na­tion, and we’re in deep dis­cus­sions to see if that could hap­pen in the near term.”

Scriv­en ac­knowl­edged that tourism con­tin­ued to play a ma­jor role in the de­vel­op­ment of the Caribbean and IDB In­vest was aim­ing to bol­ster the sec­tor.

“We un­der­stand the im­por­tant role that tourism plays, di­rect­ly and in­di­rect­ly in job cre­ation and sup­ply chains with­in each of the coun­tries. And that’s an­oth­er big sec­tor for us.”

Scriv­en said IDB In­vest would large­ly fo­cus on in­dus­tries such as in­fra­struc­ture and en­er­gy, the cor­po­rate sec­tor and the fi­nan­cial sec­tor.

“We are very in­volved in in­vest­ing in ports, air­ports, roads, any form of trans­port and lo­gis­tics. There are large in­vest­ments that we’re do­ing. And sec­ond­ly, and re­lat­ed to that, in the en­er­gy sec­tor, we do a lot of re­new­able en­er­gy to sup­ply re­li­able and cheap sources, or cheap­er sources of fund­ing for en­er­gy, main­ly in the re­new­able en­er­gy space. So that’s in­fra­struc­ture and en­er­gy in the cor­po­rate sec­tor.

“We do have a large fo­cus on agribusi­ness and tourism. In agribusi­ness, we are in prepar­ing coun­tries to sub­sti­tute im­ports. As you know, in the Caribbean, a large per­cent­age of food is im­port­ed, and our idea is work­ing lo­cal­ly to be able to pro­duce lo­cal­ly. And that’s our agribusi­ness sec­tor and the tourism sec­tor,” said Scriv­en.