The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) marks the fortieth anniversary of its establishment this month basking in the glow of fulsome praise from both its borrowing and non-borrowing member countries and now adequately resourced to implement the support programmes that will be invaluable in helping the region recover from the ravages of a debilitating global financial and economic crisis.

At its recent Annual General Meeting in Nassau, Bahamas the CDB’s Board of Governors handed the bank a resounding vote of confidence by bestowing its approval on its 2010-2014 Strategic Plan. It backed that approval with a US$1 billion increase in the bank’s ordinary capital; the single largest expansion of resources in its history.

These recent events signal a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of an important regional institution which, just a decade ago appeared to have been threatened with imminent collapse in the face of dismal report cards tendered by its non-borrowing member countries, which are responsible, both directly and indirectly for ensuring the financial health of the institution. Then, the United Kingdom had described the bank as being at a “crossroad”. France withdrew altogether from membership of the bank while two other non-borrowing member countries – Germany and Italy – decided not to contribute to the general capital increase which the CDB had sought. Simultaneously, key multilateral financing institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Develop-ment Bank had also made their own gloomy pronouncements on the state of the institution.

This, of course, is not to say that the CDB has not, all along, made a noteworthy contribution to financing regional projects and shoring up regional economies in times of crisis. The Caricom observer at the recent Nassau meeting of the bank’s Board of Governors captured those contributions – including two timely interventions in the 1970s and 1980s to provide compensatory financing in the wake of global energy price rises – while Guyana’s Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh in his own presentation, paid tribute to what he described as the bank’s “impressive history of disbursement” over the course of the last forty years.

In his own address, incumbent CDB President Dr Compton Bourne opted to remind members of the ‘tremendous anxiety” felt by borrowing member countries, drawing on the criticisms of the bank’s performance made at that time – that is, in 2000 – when things appeared to have virtually fallen apart. The issues at that time appeared to centre around a lack of responsiveness on the bank’s part to its members, the exclusion of shareholders from discussions and failure by the bank to make sufficient use of borrowing from MFIs. In the decade that has followed the CDB has been forced to put a raft of house-cleaning measures in place including, significantly reducing the cost of its administrative expenses, revamping policies and procedures for recruitment of managerial and professional staff, and minimizing the restrictive practices in its recruitment policy that militated against the recruitment of a younger pool of talent.

The turnaround has indeed been impressive and challenges the widely-held notion that some the institutions and mechanisms set up to  support the development of regional economies and further the strengthening of the Caribbean Community are not working as they should. Such criticisms have, from time to time, been made of the Caribbean Commu-nity Secretariat itself while, even now, some countries in the region, including Guyana have been publicly expressing concern over what they consider to be the questionable contribution of the Single Market mechanism to equitably enhancing intra-regional trade.

In this context, the changing fortunes of the CDB must serve as a kind of beacon to guide those other regional institutions that may be facing legitimate questions about the extent of their effectiveness in the realization of their stated goals. Dr Bourne’s address to the bank’s 40th meeting of its Board of Governors hints strongly at the remedial requirements. These include an unerring focus on prudent management, dispensing with needless and counterproductive bureaucratic policies, recruitment policies that recognize home-grown talent and dispenses with “restrictive” employment practices and keeping continually in view the importance of a consolidated vision of the bank’s role among the territories in the region for whose benefit it was created in the first place. The CDB, we trust, has learnt valuable lessons from its past. Other regional institutions must also learn from those lessons by undertaking the same kind of serious, open-minded soul-searching that acknowledges deficiencies and shapes dispositions that places them on a path to remedial action.

Happy 40th Anniversary CDB!