Other criteria for access to funding necessary

“To graduate CARICOM Member States from access to grant aid, concessionary financial resources or technical assistance, on the basis of per capita income cannot be right.”

This is the argument of CARICOM Secretary General, Irwin LaRocque, as he spoke on the “troubling and vexing issues of differentiation and graduation”, which deny many member states access from grant funding.

“Per Capita Income is, at best, an arithmetic ratio.  It does not measure the level of poverty; it does not address the distribution of income; it does not say whether the economy is resilient and on a path to sustainable growth; and it certainly does not measure the capacity of a country to self-finance its growth,” he stated.

Addressing the Third High-Level forum on Donor Co-ordination recently, LaRocque pointed out that with the current economic environment severely challenging the capacity of most CARICOM States to self finance their own development, grant financing and access to concessionary financial resources to finance development were becoming increasingly more important to CARICOM States, “particularly at this time, when some of our International Develop-ment Partners are looking inwards and are even reducing the net outflow of their development co-operation provided through grant aid and concessionary financing”.

He therefore pointed to the greater responsibility of the CARICOM Secretariat in ensuring co-ordination of the regional resource mobilisation effort, to minimise the impact on member states
by partners shifting from bi-lateral assistance to relying more on regional programmes.

Pointing to the move to design a Resource Mobilisation Strategy to ensure adequate financing of regional and national priorities to catalyse and ignite growth in CARICOM States, he added, “We will familiarise you with our development plans, strategies and priorities. We will jointly examine priority areas in which you can be of assistance to us. We will map out approaches intended to ensure that your assistance will facilitate development in our areas of priority and we will address how we can optimise the use of scarce resources.” (JMB)