Pres­i­dent of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank Ilan Gold­fa­jn has urged T&T to con­tin­ue its ef­forts to build re­silience amid grow­ing ex­ter­nal pres­sures.

In his ad­dress at the pre-an­nu­al meet­ing of the board of gov­er­nors of the Caribbean Coun­try De­part­ment of the IDB at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day he not­ed that Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean has seen “more fre­quent and cost­ly nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.”

He how­ev­er said in the midst of these chal­lenges T&T has shown the way to over­come these chal­lenges.

“T&T has been an ex­am­ple of how we can over­come tough chal­lenges. T&T used its her­itage and sta­bil­i­sa­tion fund to ex­pand so­cial sup­port and pro­vide cred­it to small com­pa­nies. That kept busi­ness­es afloat and pro­tect­ed jobs.

“T&T al­so con­tin­ued to ad­vance its am­bi­tious dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion strat­e­gy. They cre­at­ed a ded­i­cat­ed Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion that puts the coun­try at the fore­front of an area that is crit­i­cal for you, for IDB but in gen­er­al for you to cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties and ac­cel­er­ate de­vel­op­ment,” said the IDB pres­i­dent who al­so hailed the coun­try’s moves to adopt green en­er­gy and de­vel­op a hy­dro­gen sec­tor.

Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les said the Caribbean was in a pre­car­i­ous po­si­tion as a re­sult of cli­mate change and ris­ing sea lev­els, as she not­ed stud­ies sug­gest­ed that sig­nif­i­cant nat­ur­al re­sources and in­dus­tries could be lost if these is­sues are left unchecked. This she ex­plained could cost the Caribbean bil­lions of dol­lars.

“While two to four cen­time­tres may seem diminu­tive to some, any fur­ther sea lev­el rise will be cat­a­stroph­ic for our is­lands. This af­fects the very no­tion of re­silience and sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment which has brought us to­geth­er to­day,” said Beck­les.

“In terms of ad­dress­ing the threat of cli­mate change to the Caribbean, the cost of in­ac­tion is ex­treme­ly high. Pro­jec­tions in­di­cate that cu­mu­la­tive loss­es could to­tal US$22 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly by the year 2050, a fig­ure rep­re­sent­ing in the area of 10 per cent of the Caribbean’s econ­o­my,” she said.

Beck­les al­so not­ed the re­gion was not just reel­ing from the ef­fects of cli­mate change and the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic but the eco­nom­ic shocks cre­at­ed by the Rus­sia-Ukraine con­flict.

Gold­fa­jn urged T&T to utilise the re­sources of­fered by the IDB to fur­ther bol­ster the busi­ness sec­tor, not­ing that the bank had con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the growth of Ja­maican en­tre­pre­neur­ship.

The IDB pres­i­dent al­so praised T&T’s pro­gres­sive ap­proach in the work­force, not­ing that the coun­try had large­ly ac­cept­ed fe­male lead­ers in nu­mer­ous fields with the Pres­i­dent, the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice and sev­er­al gov­ern­ment Min­is­ters be­ing women.

Gold­fa­jn said, “IDB re­search shows that this coun­try leads all of Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean with women fill­ing about 69 per cent of all pub­lic sec­tor lead­er­ship po­si­tions. I ap­plaud all of these achieve­ments.”