T&Ts tourism in­fra­struc­ture is set to get a bil­lion-dol­lar boost.

“CAF—De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca—ap­proved a US$200 mil­lion loan to sup­port T&T’s man­age­ment, plan­ning and in­vest­ment of tourism in­fra­struc­ture through bet­ter in­sti­tu­tion­al and reg­u­la­to­ry frame­works,” a re­lease from the CAF stat­ed yes­ter­day.

“These funds will be man­aged by the Min­istry of Fi­nance and will sup­port dif­fer­ent on­go­ing in­sti­tu­tion­al ini­tia­tives, such as the up­grade of the Na­tion­al Tourism Pol­i­cy; the strate­gic plan for the Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty; the de­vel­op­ment of a Na­tion­al Mar­itime Pol­i­cy and Strat­e­gy; the analy­sis to de­vel­op ports and lo­gis­tics hub in the coun­try, specif­i­cal­ly in Port-of-Spain; and the de­vel­op­ment and in­te­gra­tion of the Port Com­mu­ni­ty Sys­tem (PCS) in the ports’ lo­gis­tic chain,” the re­lease stat­ed.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the loan in­cludes ac­tions to im­prove oth­er tourism in­fra­struc­ture linked to beach­es, air­ports, con­nec­tiv­i­ty be­tween is­lands and ac­cess to sec­tors that are at­trac­tive to vis­i­tors.

“We are work­ing close­ly with the gov­ern­ment of T&T to sup­port the im­ple­men­ta­tion of its de­vel­op­ment plan, that pro­motes the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the coun­try’s econ­o­my through bet­ter lev­els of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, bet­ter in­fra­struc­ture, and the im­prove­ment of process­es and reg­u­la­to­ry frame­works to op­ti­mise the mar­itime and air lo­gis­tics of the coun­try, ”CAF’s ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent Luis Car­ran­za stat­ed.

In the last three years (2017-2019) CAF ap­proved US$800 mil­lion for T&T, which rep­re­sents an av­er­age of US$267 mil­lion per year.