With approximately six months of his tenure as President of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) remaining, Jamaican-born Dr William Warren Smith has been talking up the role that the Bank has been playing in supporting the growth of the economies of the region. Speaking at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors last month, Smith said that the CDB had been instrumental in helping to transform the Caribbean. Contextually, he noted that between 2011 and 2019, the Bank’s approvals had amounted to US$2.5 billion and that the bulk of the funds disbursed had gone into regional projects in transportation, social infrastructure, environment, sea defence, disaster management, reconstruction, and energy.
And according to Smith the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic did not diminish the Bank’s energy in terms of providing funds for supporting development projects in the region. He noted that total approvals by the Bank in 2020 were anticipated to reach US$470 million and that actual disbursements during the year were likely to be around US$367 million.
Smith, who was appointed president of the CDB in May 2011, noted that over the past decade the institution had played a role in narrowing the infrastructure deficit in the Caribbean and has also played a key role in improving access to social and economic services. During the same period, CDB funding had financed the construction and upgrading of around 2,400 kilometers of roads in various Caribbean territories while some sixty communities across the region had benefitted from community-based interventions in disaster risk management to reduce vulnerability and strengthen the capacity of residents to cope with hazard-related occurrences.
In the area of education, Smith said that the CDB had contributed to improving learning conditions in the Caribbean by building human capital through investments in more than 1,600 classrooms and the training of almost 13,000 teachers. These initiatives, he said, continue to benefit some 469,000 students across the region. The CDB president also noted that by installing and upgrading more than 800 kilometers of water-supply lines in various communities across the region, it has facilitated access to enhanced water and sanitation services for an estimated 62,700 people.
And according to Smith, these achievements by the CDB had resulted from the deepening of strategic partnerships relations and the mobilisation of resources from various donor countries and multilateral financial institutions with a strong focus on garnering financing for climate change adaptation, renewable energy and energy efficiency, better positioning the region to cope with the impact of climate change while better meeting the Caribbean’s energy demands sustainably.
The fifth president of the CDB, Smith was first elected to the position at a special meeting of the Bank’s Board of Governors in October 2010 and re-elected in November 2015. He is due to demit office in April.
