What is likely to be one of the more critical meetings of the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in recent times will be staged virtually from March 28 to April 1.
The unsurprising decision, taken against the backdrop of the still rampaging COVID-19 pandemic and the requisite precautions that have, for more than a year now, impacted on the communications setting employed in the staging of key international meetings, once again robs a key forum of what remains the preferred communication setting for optimising the effectiveness of interaction on key developmental issues.
The Governors of the bank, the highest policy-formulating authority, are usually Ministers of Finance, or else, high officials of the central banks of the forty-eight member countries.
The agenda for the IDB meeting is expected to undertake an examination of the socio-economic impact which the pandemic has had on member countries, the extent to which this has retarded development in those countries and what it will take to effect a measure of repair of the damage.
The impact on education, health care, employment and poverty, will come in for particular scrutiny while strategies for what is likely, in some instances, to be a slow recovery process will be examined.
The forum will hardly be unmindful of the IDB’s now significantly enhanced responsibility for providing socio-economic support to the hardest hit countries in the hemisphere and how to garner the resources to respond to what, in effect, are weightier than usual challenges.
What will also engage the attention of the virtual IDB forum will be the portents for enhanced economic fortunes of some member countries, like Guyana, given the resources that now derive from the country’s oil and gas resources as well as projections for other anticipated gains likely to arise from ongoing economic pursuits in other borrowing member countries.
