 Economic recovery in small island developing states will require not only greater cooperation from international financial institutions, but also increase resourcefulness of seeds themselves. Prime Minister the Honourable Alain Chastney conveyed these sentiments during an online panel of the World Economic Forum's The Davos Agenda on Wednesday. Discussion during the events surrounded capitalizing on opportunities to reset the economic system and building one that incentivizes sustainable and economic growth with strong private sector participation. Details in this report. We're going to have to now do things for ourselves to show the rest of the world that we are ready. Prime Minister Hon. Alain Chastney calls for strengthened resolve of small island developing states and a unified approach in managing similar economic development hurdles, while emphasizing the need for international financial agencies to better accommodate seeds inflicted by external shocks. The nation leader believes these same affected countries must take initiative. His suggestions include cost-effective diplomacy and building new revenue streams for a sink fund of free capital to manage such crises. That's something that's on us, right? I think that the first discipline to be able to develop the reserve funds, whether it's on a national basis or on a regional integration. So we have the OECS or we have CARICOM or we have the wider body of SIDS where we're pulling monies together that we can help ourselves out. But certainly integration is critical and the fight always is sovereignty. So let's take foreign affairs as an example. Everybody wants to have their own foreign office in New York, their own foreign office in London, their own foreign office in Washington, DC. But has the time come for us to now look at how we can share that cost? The Prime Minister adds that SIDS participation within international agencies can also be consolidated at reduced cost and greater efficiency. Honourable Shasne Headlining, a special panel of the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda 2021 this week, was supported in this view by panellist Pacific Islands official Zarak Khan. As the Prime Minister has said, the first thing we're trying to do is help ourselves. So the Pacific what we're doing is we're setting up an innovative financing facility called the Pacific Resilience Facility. We're working with our development partners to develop this facility and also link up with investment managers. We're looking at a $1.5 billion US dollar facility that can support community level projects in the Pacific Island countries, particularly in terms of building resilience focusing on adaptation. The leaders maintain the need for a concurrent review of international financial systems to appropriately cater to SIDS, particularly as the pandemic has exacerbated their debt crisis created by natural disasters, among other unexpected shocks. With onset of COVID-19 and the pandemic, our debt to GDP ratio went from about 46% to 81% in terms of borrowings. And so we very much subscribe to the thoughts of the Honourable Prime Minister in the sense that it appears that the multilateral finance institutions and the way that the global financing landscape is structured at the moment, it does not tailor to the needs of small island developing states. I think there needs to be a sit down to re-engineer how we're going to treat small island developing states in the global context. And that would be with the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, and certainly within Brent and Woods, because it's an impossible task, but yet there is a lot that we're contributing to the development of the world. Like other SIDS dependent on tourism, St. Lucia's gross domestic product declined due to effects of the pandemic. In an eight month span, the island's GDP went from 59% to 85%, worsening its debt crisis. For the Government Information Service, I am Jesse Layance reporting.