Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is trav­el­ing to Bar­ba­dos to­day to meet with se­nior U.S. gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.

Ac­com­pa­ny­ing the Prime Min­is­ter on the trip will be Dr. Amery Browne, the Min­is­ter of For­eign and CARI­COM Af­fairs.

While Dr Row­ley is in Bar­ba­dos, Min­is­ter Stu­art Young will act as Prime Min­is­ter.

Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment from the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, the fo­cus of the dis­cus­sions will in­clude the Bridgetown Ini­tia­tive—a pro­pos­al call­ing for sig­nif­i­cant re­form of the in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial sys­tem to ad­dress chal­lenges faced by small and de­vel­op­ing na­tions.

The 2022 Ini­tia­tive led by Bar­ba­dos fo­cused on re­form­ing the way rich coun­tries fi­nance poor coun­tries in a cli­mate cri­sis, de­tail­ing ways to change how de­vel­op­ment fi­nance works. It sought to get in­sti­tu­tions to treat re­gion­al states more fair­ly in the cur­rent dif­fi­cult times and to get terms and con­di­tions con­cern­ing ex­ter­nal fi­nanc­ing.

At yes­ter­day’s Post-Cab­i­net Me­dia Brief­ing, the PM re­vealed that in the ef­fort led by Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley, he had been to Wash­ing­ton on more than one oc­ca­sion, and the US del­e­ga­tion has been to the Caribbean.

“We think we made some progress, but it’s crys­tallised in some­thing called the Bridgetown Ini­tia­tive, which we need to de­fend, grow and ad­vance in the US au­thor­i­ties and to the in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial bod­ies. There­fore, we meet in Bar­ba­dos,” Row­ley ex­plained.

Dr Row­ley is sched­uled to re­turn on Sun­day.