 Dean Lian, the president of the African Development Bank, Dr. Akinumi Adeshina, distinguished governors, madams and gentlemen. I'm very honored to deliver this speech on behalf of the Brazilian government and the regional non-borrowing member countries at this first in-presence annual meeting after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak almost two and a half years ago. By that time, none of us could really picture the overwhelming challenges that would stand before us, our economies and our nations. We must not forget, though, that at the center of all this, there were people, individuals who lost their jobs, their sources of income and their lives for the disease. The pandemic has taught us many lessons. We have learned to cope with it and to care for ourselves and for others. We have experienced the power of nature to recover once human activities have stalled and understood how damaging they can be to the environment. We have learned to trust in science and how small and interconnected the world is. We have been taught that in this planet, political borders cannot fully protect populations from being affected. And most important, we have learned that trustful information, knowledge sharing and cooperation are key to overcome both man-made crises and natural disasters, and thus in achieving anticipated results. This notwithstanding, we can neither neglect nor underestimate the negative effects of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, particularly over inflation, food security and the interest rates. This year's theme for the annual meeting summarizes in many aspects my previous affirmation. By improving its measurement and evaluation systems, the CDB, as well as other multilateral development institutions, will profit from more qualified information and thus will be more prepared to support its borrowing member states with tailored financial solutions and innovative instruments that consider particularities of the beneficiaries and are in line with national development priorities. The recovery duration adjuster is a good example of how indicators can be improved to better reflect the reality and thus provide policy builders with more accurate data that will boost the efficacy and effectiveness of the bank's actions and scale up the impact of its operations. In addition, we value the efforts of the CDB to put in place its knowledge hub, an organic cloud and navigational digital ecosystem aimed at consolidating data and generating useful information and for creating and disseminating knowledge. We stress, however, that besides being trustful, information must be also timely enough to avoid opportunity losses and enable decision makers to promote a course correction even while operations are still ongoing. Strong and inclusive digital foundations are the best way to ensure it and to contribute to development goals in a sustainable manner. The rapid and comprehensive response given by the Brazilian government was decisive to prevent more profound social impacts stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brazilian emergency aid program benefited 68 million informal and poll workers and enabled the injection of almost 8.5% of the GDP into the economy in the first year of the pandemic. This was made possible by digitally processing the operation of the benefit as well as leveraging digital assets in the selection and onboarding of beneficiaries and online payment methods for the grants. Another crucial breakthrough was the creation of the PIX system by the Brazilian Monetary Authority. The PIX, as we call it, is a payment platform that allows instant money transfers between individuals, companies and the government using a smartphone. It may sound as a simple solution, but that has revolutionized business transactions and reduced bureaucracy in my country. I trust that CDB could profit from its regional non-borrowing member countries, development solutions and further leverage the knowledge capital that we have been accumulating over the years while tackling issues similar to those experienced locally in the Caribbean region. Therefore, I seized the opportunity to reaffirm our engagement with the bank and with the twin objectives of reducing poverty and boost prosperity. Lastly, I would like to convey my most sincere appreciation to the government and the people of Turks and Caicos for their warm welcome in this beautiful island and efficient preparation in hosting the annual meetings. We extend our thanks to the bank for its long-standing support and wish to all of you a joyful and profitable annual meeting. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brazil, for that intervention on behalf of regional non-borrowing member countries. And now I'll call on the Governor for China. No, I'm told that we're not going there. I believe there's a recording somewhere, but okay, stuff happens. At this time, I'm going to ask us to be upstanding for the presentation, the keynote address by the CDB president, Dr. hygienist, Jane Leone, Dr. Jane, welcome to the podium. Good morning. Please be seated. This is the first in person, but I didn't expect a standing welcome. Your Excellency Nigel Dakin, Governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands, Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, the Honorable Charles Washington Misick, and First Lady, Mrs. Delphia Russell Misick. Your Excellency, Anya Williams, Deputy Governor, members of the Cabinet, our special guest, President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Akinoumi E. Adashina, members of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, senior government officials of the Turks and Caicos Islands government, members of the Caribbean Development Bank's senior management team and members of the staff of the bank, other specially invited guests, members of the media, ladies and gentlemen. Let me add my own personal welcome to the 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors and observed that after two years of disruptions due to the pandemic, what better way to restart face-to-face engagement than here in the very beautiful Turks and Caicos Islands. Premier, I wish to thank you, your government and the people of Turks and Caicos Islands, for the exceptional hospitality afforded to us thus far, and our governors and Board of Directors for the continued support and strong encouragement as we take forward the development business for the people of this region. Governors, last year I said we must move with deliberate haste. I also said that there can be no sustained development without resilience. And because development has to be holistic, meaning leaving no aspect behind, resilience must therefore be multifaceted. And so we need a resilience ecosystem capable of absorbing the exogenous shocks we are exposed to. This year's meeting takes place against the backdrop of the enduring aftermath of COVID-19 and now the impact of the Russia-Ukraine War. This conflict has already affected commodity and financial markets, raised energy prices, increased inflation, heightened food insecurity, and slowed global growth. The sharp increase in energy prices is further straining fragile fiscal positions in our borrowing member countries and threatening to derail the nascent economic recovery. Even as growth in the Caribbean region is expected to rebound to around 6 percent in 2022, that's on the strength of the rebound in tourism and the performance of Guyana, and a rebound from an average decline of around 8 percent in 2020, roughly half of our internationally rated BMCs have suffered credit downgrades since the onset of the pandemic. Consequently, many of our governments are now challenged to work on economic tightrope while at the same time trying to drive the development agenda. Essentially, Governors, sustainable recovery now hangs in the balance, and the imperative to aggressively pursue resilience is even more urgent. With this in mind, I take as my starting point today the words of my dear friend and brother President Adishina, we must be prepared to sprint fast, like Shelley and Fraser Price of Jamaica, and run long like Elliot Kipchoge of Kenya. That is to say we must accelerate our development trajectory, and we must be able to stay the course over the long haul. That is, development once started must be sustained. The 2030 targets are not just boxes to be checked off. The path we embark on must take us beyond 2030. As I share my thoughts on how we accelerate and sustain development, I will spend a few moments reflecting on the road traveled over the last 12 months of our pursuit of holistic development. And then I will elaborate on a few major initiatives for 2022 and beyond. When I assumed office just over a year ago, my presentation to the Board outlined an agenda that focused on the transformative and sustainable development of our BMCs with the ultimate goal of improving the welfare of our people. This approach, which I have been consistently promoting regionally, speaks to development that is both holistic and inclusive, with resilience and innovation as cornerstones. The fundamental themes around which much of my efforts have been centered are sustainable livelihoods, resilient economies, connectivity, and innovation hub. These are fully aligned with the 2030 sustainable development goals that we need to pursue expeditiously if we are to fundamentally alter the development path of the region and place our societies on a higher and more resilient sustainable welfare path in the future. The challenge before us is how best to navigate a safe path from legacy structural weaknesses to transformative development while maintaining that sustainability, enhancing macroeconomic and financial stability, and building resilience against a myriad of shocks, surely not an easy mix to actually get together. Among shocks I would like to highlight climate change, which if unchecked can pose an existential threat to the region. Governors with the best of intentions and with access to adequate and affordable finance, our efforts will labor in producing results without a significant jolt to our implementation capacity. To achieve this, our first order of business at the bank was to revise our strategic plan to reflect the changed context and circumstances of the Caribbean development trajectory. Reflecting our new vision, we anchored the revised plan on five dimensions of resilience, social resilience, productive capacity resilience, environmental resilience, institutional resilience, and financial resilience. Secondly, and in alignment with a key theme over the past year of measuring better to target better, we recognized that the Caribbean Development Bank itself needed to become a knowledge-enabled learning organization with a virtual knowledge hub, a network of networks as it were, capable of accessing global information, calling experiences of and factors contributing to success, and at the same time creating value for strategies that when implemented can yield transformative development. To be clear, the philosophy of embracing knowledge creation from accumulation to discovery to strategic transformation touches everything we do and manifests in every development challenge that we face, from achieving food security to compiling the genome structure of herbs and plants in agriculture, for creating medicines to designing resilient roofs capable of generating and withstanding the fury, generating electricity and withstanding the fury of hurricanes, while providing an adequate supply of clean, renewable energy. In other words, we need to embrace what I am calling the industrialization of knowledge. This will require improvements in current processes, organizational culture, technology, and a fearless growth-oriented mindset to underpin our knowledge management and evidence-based decision creation. To illustrate, the knowledge hub could encompass a tracker for the region's development process and progress. It can be a platform for policy options and the design of SDGs. It can be used to promote warehouse information on feasible and development-driven investment opportunities, the regulatory environment, and doing business conditions that could promote cross-border investments. It could be used to be a database with comparable economic, social, and environmental statistics and partial-screened project ideas that could help advance sustainable development. Further, it could also be used as a fertile ground for spawning innovative ideas and products. All those fall within the philosophy of a knowledge hub. Third, in recognition of the fact that the internal resilience capacity of our BMCs must be accounted for in determining their ability to recover from exogenous shocks, we made steady progress with the development of the recovery duration adjuster, which builds on the United Nations' multidimensional vulnerability index by integrating vulnerability and resilience in a dynamic and forward-looking manner to better reflect the economic, social, and environmental realities of small island developing states. This framework focuses on measuring the internal resilience capacity of seeds, which, because of their peculiar vulnerabilities and state of development, face the reality of a much longer recovery time from a shock compared with developed nations. It proposes to replace gross national income, GNI, which is widely recognized as an inadequate metric to determine access to concessional finance by an internal resilience capacity metric for gauging a country's eligibility to access adequate and affordable finance. We launched this framework at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in November of 2021 in the United Kingdom, and have since held discussions and made presentations to several stakeholder groups, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the United Nations High-Level Panel on the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index. With that background of what we have engaged in over the last year, I'd like to fast forward a little and talk about big initiatives we are looking at for 2022. So as we look towards 2022 and 2023 and beyond that, no one could have anticipated the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic or the protracted nature of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. We are also yet to see the full ramifications of this conflict for our region. This prolonged uncertainty necessitates, I want to underline, necessitates that we proceed with even more haste to create the sustainable future that we envisage for the region. And as such, we need to focus our attention on what this future should look like and how we could best create it, not how we could best let it happen, how we could best create it. Now that we have laid the contours for sustainable development in our region, our focus for 2022 to 2023 will be on advancing food and nutrition security, energy security, and water security. I think you will all agree these are three key securities that the region cannot afford not to address over the near and long term. So let me begin first with food and nutrition security. For decades, the Caribbean has been over reliant on food imports. The World Bank estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of all food consumed in the region comes from abroad and only three countries in the region, Guyana, Belize, and Haiti, produce more than 50 percent of their own food. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities across the board, including in employment, housing, healthcare, and food security. It is estimated that there are now 2.7 million food insecure people in the English-speaking Caribbean. And according to the third round of the CARICOM COVID-19 food security and livelihood impact survey, 71 percent of respondents observe higher than usual food prices. While a breakdown of responses by gender wasn't presented by that survey, we know historically in this region women are disproportionately affected by food and nutrition security. As a region, we must therefore focus on building a modern, competitive, inclusive, and resilient agricultural sector in which food and nutrition security have primacy of place and the potential for wealth creation as an attraction to young agripreneurs. And again, I'm going to use the word of my brother president here. At the recent agri-investment and food forum in Guyana, as mentioned by our governor, Minister Singh, CARICOM heads of government expressed grave concern about food shortages, the high prices of imported food, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs, and the limited options for transportation of agricultural products within the region. They have stressed the need for urgent action to take forward the vision for agricultural development, championed by President Irfan Ali of Guyana, that targets a reduction in the food import bill by 25 percent by 2025, what we call the 25 by 2025 agenda. And if I may add, 25 by 2025 is not enough. Why don't we double it? 50 percent no later than 2030. Minister, please take this to President Ali. We need to, we need to up the game. Efforts to reduce the food import bill must be underpinned by investments in climate smart and resilient agricultural technologies by research and development and knowledge systems that connect farmers, industry, and research to sustain the long-term development of the sector. And I'd like to, at that point, welcome the gracious offer from, again, President Adesina as of last night in terms of tech transfer and training potential and the collaboration across MDBs that can actually help spur and drive that very agricultural sector push that we are talking about. It must also include new opportunities for women-owned agribusinesses. As in many of our BMCs, women provide the link between the farm and the traditional marketplace, yet remain at the bottom of the value chain. In endorsing this shared vision for food security, facilitated by our current agricultural policy and strategy and integrated logistics, we have already commenced discussions with partners on mobilizing flexible and innovative financing to support this initiative. We also believe that our appraisal of the establishment of a CDB-led regional hub for the International Trade Center Global Initiative, She-Trades, will be able to integrate more women in the regional and global agritrade business, providing value added for women-owned agri-enterprises. Our onto energy security. Energy is an essential input to all economic activity and has critical ramifications in the social and environmental context. Our high dependence on imported fossil fuels and the associated high cost of electricity has been stifling the pace of growth and development in the region, including poverty reduction efforts and is a continued threat to the attainment of the sustainable development goals. As such, there is a dire and urgent need to accelerate the transition to increase renewable energy generation, utilizing our abundant solar, wind, hydro and geothermal resources. While doing so, we need to ensure, and this is important, that the transition is managed to minimize the potential negative effects of disruption and to ensure that it is just. It is not a zero one fossil fuels today, 100 percent renewables tomorrow. The cost of disruption cannot be ignored and therefore the pace at which we make that transition has to be an essential element of that development agenda that we are talking about. And I want to underline this because it is important for some of our BMCs such as Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago whose economies are largely reliant today on fossil fuels. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. Over the last decade, the region has been pursuing a shift towards sustainable energy through the increased use of renewable energy sources and improvements in energy efficiency. The target agreed by our energy ministers is for a 47 percent contribution from renewable energy by 2027, which translates into a 55 percent contribution by 2030. However, progress towards that target, admittedly, has been slow. On an annual basis, our renewable energy penetration rate will need to increase 13-fold if we are to achieve the target of 55 percent by 2030. So, therefore, there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to go forward. However, the current estimate of doing that, the transition we talk of, will cost over 20 billion US dollars, 20 billion US dollars. At the bank, we are updating our energy sector policy and strategy and have proposed to embed within it a framework called the Accelerated Sustainable Energy and Resilience Transition 2030. And that's a lot to keep in mind, so you can just keep the acronym ASERT, A-S-E-R-T, ASERT 2030 framework. And so you'll be hearing from CDB when we talk about ASERT Initiative 1, ASERT Initiative 2. But that's all about accelerating, accelerating the sustainable energy framework. And that is intended to support our BMCs as they urgently ramp up the energy sector transitions. Third, water security. Water security, which is already being threatened by the impact of climate change, is especially critical to the region's development, especially in key sectors such as health, agriculture and tourism. Since 2018, CDB has supported with partners the development, refinement and promotion of the regional strategic action plan for climate resilience in the water sector in the Caribbean. We are currently revising our water policy, strategy and operational guidelines with the support of Agence Francaise, the development, with a completion date of December 2022, end of this year. At the country level, we are supporting approximately US$131 million in projects in Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Louis and Nevis and Suriname, which are delivering on all elements of the water chain and infrastructure in institutional strengthening and capacity building to enhance water security through works, systems and people. We are also collaborating with the IDB and the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility on the formation of a Caribbean Water Utility Insurance Company with an initial product launch planned for sometime in 2022. So what would be the target we would need to be able to look forward to? So going forward in the water sector, our target is to reduce non-revenue water from an average of 60% today to no more than 30% by 2030, and to significantly strengthen data collection, sharing an analysis to support integrated water resources management. Governors, the development needs of the region and the attainment of the SDGs require significant collective effort and financial resources. I have highlighted food, energy and water, but there are additional SDGs that would need to be equally addressed. But building on this year's theme of Measure Better to Target Better, I propose for next year that we hone in on the theme of access to adequate and affordable finance, and we will state it today its hashtag AAAF, access to adequate and affordable finance. Why is this? Because we cannot do any of the securities we talked about in food, in energy and in water without access to finance. We cannot do any of the development that we are talking about without access to finance. But it is not just finance, it has to be quality finance, and quality finance now becomes adequate, has to be sufficient and affordable, such that we can get out of the debt trap that would ensue if we are not able to mobilize finance at an affordable rate. This access will shape a future where our citizens can live quality lives in societies that have embraced digitalization and possess robust private sector partnership with the requisite governance arrangements to safeguard food and energy security. So let me put this in context for you in terms of the numbers we are talking about. Initial estimates we have done at the CDB suggest that providing financing for projects on the scale and visage in building resilience, encouraging transformation, and achieving sustainable development would require upwards of $100 billion over the next decade, $100 billion over the next decade. That is the entirety of the GDP of all of our countries put together in terms of one yet. Across our BMCs, during 2023 to 2030, we estimate that sustainable energy will require at least $40 billion. Water and sanitation $22 billion. Transportation an additional $11.5 billion. Agriculture and food security, possibly $13 billion. Digital transformation another $12 billion. And these are mostly infrastructure and associated elements to generate the three goals we are talking about. But in addition, we have also said that we need to move to halving poverty by 2030. And for that to happen, BMCs would require an investment approximately of another $10 billion annually. So if we take another decade, that's another $100 billion that we would need to put onto that tab. And that $10 billion, I need not tell you, far exceeds the current investment levels in the region. So obviously our needs are humongous. How we are going to get there is the quintessential problem that we need to solve. And hence why next year we want to dedicate the entire year to access to adequate and affordable financing. So cognizant of the current capacity of CDB, I posit that meeting this target will be a function of creating partnerships to facilitate access to adequate and affordable financing for development. In other words, we do not have the means to do it on our own. And the only way we can get there is if we can crowd in, if we can bring various players together, various stakeholders together to allow us to make a dent in the element of development that we propose. We are equally aware that our regional governments have been playing a significant role in driving development at the national and regional levels, but recognize at the same time that they cannot do it alone, especially given current high debt levels and the limited fiscal space that they are all struggling with. And therefore, we need to embrace the private sector as the other side to crowd in to allow us to make a dent in development. So the private sector will need to play an equally important role in delivering development outcomes and in financing sustainable transformation and development in the region. Hence the clarion call to create a partnership for development, a partnership for development, not a public-private partnership, a partnership for development between the public and private sectors, where national anchor goals like food and nutrition security, energy security, and water security drive individual and joint efforts at achieving milestones to the ultimate anchors. This has to be underpinned by national dialogue and the fostering of an absence of policy uncertainty. So how do we mobilize the finance for development? First, we need to ensure that we have or can facilitate the mobilization of the quantum of funds needed. In other words, the adequate aspect of adequate and affordable. And for us to do this, we think it must be multi-sauce, meaning we need to crowd in from many places. It must be multi-instrument. And the framework must be such that it has a properly developed financial market infrastructure and a strong regulatory environment, because if we don't have that, there is no way you can generate the necessary confidence in the investors to allow them to want to continue to provide you with the necessary finance, which as we said is not a sprint, but a long marathon. And so we will need to be able to get funds, not for one year or for two years, but for many, many years going forward. Therefore, it will be important to distinguish, in my mind, various uses of finance. All finance is not created equally, and all finance is not used in the same way. And consequently, we believe in the multi-sauce, multi-instrument environment that we are talking about, we need to be able to distinguish financing for rescue operations, financing for recovery operations, and financing for long-term repositioning. Because while we are at the game of reacting and fixing and getting ourselves back from crises, we have to, at the same time, run a parallel track of ensuring that we have access to finance for the longer-term development that we seek to obtain. So therefore, this is a sprint and a long-distance run at the same time, but using our finance in a very discriminatory way. We will need a suite of financing instruments with specific terms that can be combined coherently to manage different needs. I've already talked about the three different types. While providing adequate governance safeguards, which is important for both the public and the private sectors. As an example, the suite of instruments that I talk about that we can use to mix, to generate the goals that we are looking to achieve, need to, by necessity, include almost all of the instruments that exist now in the financial space. So one, debt instruments, and there I can think of SDG-themed bonds, for example, green bonds, sponsored blue bonds to finance projects for ocean conservation, and marine biodiversity. We can have orange bonds for growing our cultural and creative industries, for example, our music and sports and creative design. In addition to the debt, we need to be able to crowd in private equity for funding specific development-related objectives with auxiliary governance and taxonomies to monitor, evaluate, and ensure achievement of goals. We will at the same time need contingent debt instruments. We've spoke of the insurance types like your creeps, the catastrophe bonds like we had in Jamaica, GDP bonds, or GDP index bonds that can be tailored to activity as it occurs. And what we can equally look at as policy reform or policy intervention, incentivizing bonds, that will repay dividends of refinancing at lower rates as long as you deliver on the interventions that were in the contract. And this can be done in terms of successive trenches, such that as soon as your grace period is done, you should have completed sufficient interventions to reprice your bond in a way that can reduce your debt and make your debt sustainability a lot more attractive than it would have been in the absence of that. We also need derivative-based instruments like the debt swap of Belize, and that's a whole class of instrument that we can actually begin to tailor and provide advice to our countries as to how they can manage the debts that they have now. And let's not forget concessional funding. We have the development partners, the international financial institution specialty-themed funding, such like your global climate fund and the adaptation fund or the Jeff. And all of those together, when I talk about it being multi-sourced, means that we need to be able to tap into not just what we can generate on our own, but equally what we can crowd in from the private sector, what we can get from the public sectors, domestic and external. And the key will be how do we deploy this through the multiplicity of instruments that we talk about in a way that is internally coherent and at the same time temporarily consistent in overtime. The second aspect I spoke of adequacy, the second aspect of affordability can be underpinned, we believe by greater access to concessional funds through the initiative of our recovery duration adjuster. As I indicated, this is a tool that is meant to provide more equitable access to finance through the incorporation of resilience with vulnerability that addresses better the needs of our countries rather than the current gross national income. Another way we can crowd in additional funds in a concessional way is the channeling of special drawing rights from our non-borrowing member countries and other non-members that have SDRs that they can actually mobilize through the bank. And we are seeing multilateral development banks in general, but clearly CDB in particular. And that mobilization of funds need to be such that we can focus the deployment of those funds specifically to development purposes. It is not mobilization of SDRs for mobilization sake, but mobilization with a purpose. And those purposes can very well be anchored on achieving the sustainable development goals. That would be one way of attracting new concessional resources from sovereigns and other institutions while we can equally mobilize better and deploy better the existing pool of resources that already exist. In addition to all of those, we need to promote policies to improve risk profiles and therefore lower market premiere on funds that we seek to access. I say this because we typically think that resources ought to always be just a lower price. But the truth of the matter is return and risk go hand in hand. And the only reason why markets insist on higher returns is because there is a perception that your risk is high. And therefore we can assist that process by undertaking reforms that change our risk profile. And if your risk profile changes by automatic extension, the required premiere that markets will require to access funds will automatically go down. In other words, you would be buying concessionality through investment in risk reduction. And so when I say policies for risk reduction, I think this is an area that is a self-help tool that we can engage on and help to reduce and change our risk profiles in a way that would allow us to therefore earn the right to lower premiere in market financing. So let me turn now having spoken of the need for access to finance, the multi sources that we need to access that finance, the sort of instruments that we can use to deploy all to get to that development phase. And I want to talk briefly about the concept of implementation that I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks. I want to be clear. Having adequate and affordable finance, creating opportunities for demand of projects, promoting partnerships and doing all the things that we talked about that are needed and necessary will still not yield optimal sustainable outcomes without effective implementation capacity. In other words, without implementation capacity, all the good things that we talk about, all the money that we seek to get will not bring us the results that we need. And so yesterday I joined with the governor from St. Vincent and the Grenadines in making again another clarion call. We need to address the implementation deficit in the region. The implementation deficit, if I can add looms large as possibly the most significant factor at both the institutional, national and regional levels that inhibits the ability of our countries to execute and maximize the benefits from approved policies, projects and programs that seek to deepen regional integration and achieve our sustainable development goals. We need to take decisive steps to address the bottlenecks impacting effective implementation, including reforming the legislative framework to facilitate investment and innovation, improving processes to reduce bureaucracy and lengthy procurement processes, enhancing project and people management and skills for the future of work, encouraging a cultural change in mindset. And here I'm referring to the adoption of a private sector enterprise mindset nationally, embracing failure as the spur for your next success and a strong compliance culture. And moving from a project based approach to a development continuum approach, where monitoring, evaluation, adaptation and nimbleness provide the thread linking projects to ultimate objectives. At the CDB we will be placing emphasis over the next year on the following strategic initiatives. First, developing the Knowledge Hub which I spoke to briefly, and let me give you the rationale. Ready access to updates, information and accurate information is a prerequisite for evidence-based effective knowledge creation and decision-making. However, the region's knowledge and information management processes are still quite fragmented and this has limited our ability to initiate and sustain important policy reforms. Going forward, we need to eliminate this fragmentation by building a common platform to accumulate, analyze, transform and share knowledge in the economic, social and environmental dimensions. The second initiative is we are going to embed or we wish to embed the RDA and the internal resilience capacity concepts in our internal processes. Here our focus will be on developing the vulnerability and resilience tool for adoption in the bank's operational processes. This tool will enable a deeper diagnosis of vulnerability and resilience in countries and provide some assessment of the overall ability to recover from shocks and maintain ongoing economic and social processes. Third initiative is to foster the idea of a single digital space. Digital transformation has the potential to revolutionize economic and social life by lowering information costs, reducing the cost of economic and social transactions for firms, individuals and the public sector and increasing efficiency and access to services. So here our emphasis would be on fostering the development of appropriate, harmonized, regulatory and security frameworks, upgrade of information technology infrastructure and access to broadband services across private and public sectors to achieve the common purpose of a regional secure digital grid free of all digital divides by 2035. Fourth initiative, CDB can be a regional hub for the global sheet trades initiative and thereby power an entire generation of young women into businesses. Inclusive trade is a critical component to achieving gender parity. It creates more job opportunities for women with higher wages and better working conditions. On September 2015, the International Trade Center launched the sheet trades initiative to empower women economically through greater integration in global trade and investment with a goal to connect one million women to markets by 2020 and that they have achieved. CDB is currently appraising the establishment of a CDB-led regional hub for sheet trades joining a global practice with a global partner and would also be in a position to either match or leverage additional resources to improve market access for women owned businesses. Moreover, CDB would be able to anchor its future interventions in a programmatic fashion. CDB continues to help boost women's participation in private sector development in its BMCs and is currently coordinating more support to expand their access to technical finance and investment, training, coaching, and mentoring and other technical assistance. We seek to meet a target of over 2,000 women owned led MSMEs by 2024. This specific support is viewed as critical to increasing the participation of these enterprises in public procurement markets. The bank is also encouraging the governments in its BMCs to ensure that the public procurement frameworks address any systemic barriers to women's participation and that they also promote increased participation by and opportunities for women owned businesses, indigenous people, and persons with disabilities. Governors, directors, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, as we deliberate on how to create the future we want, I ask you to join our coalition for development, including the development institutions here with us, the regional and international private sectors, the regional public sector, and our development partners. I ask us all to recommit to action, enough said, to not allow the optimism of the will to be overcome by the pessimism of the intellect. We can do what we need to do as long as we have the will to do it. CDB is the Caribbean's Development Bank and I pledge our readiness to act. As the governor for St. Vincent and the Grenadines employed us yesterday, let us not be caught arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Instead, let us match words with action and transform our reimagined visions into reality for our people. Let us move forward with deliberate haste. I thank you. Thank you, Mr. President, for that comprehensive address and timely. I think we are now ready to hear from China and on behalf of the non-regional members, member countries of the CDB. Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, fellow governors, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to represent the Chinese governor for the Caribbean Development Bank, Mr. Yigang, governor of the People's Bank of China, to deliver this statement on behalf of the non-regional members. Please allow me to extend our sincere thanks to Premier Misik of the Turks and the Caikgogs Islands, governor of the British Overseas Territories and the management and staff for the excellent organization of the two-week events in a hybrid format. We truly understand the difficulties the current global circumstances have put on the bank and its members. And the meeting is a good opportunity to discuss how we can tackle these challenges together. In 2021, countries in the Caribbean region have generally implemented strong stimulus policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase of vaccination rates and the relaxation of public health restrictions have boosted the recovery of tourism and the regional economy is going out of recession. According to the data released by the CDB, the regional economy as a whole achieved an annual growth rate of 3.1 percent after a sharp recession in 2020. The labor market has improved with significant drop of unemployment in some member countries and greater fiscal space for the region. Entering 2022, thanks to further recovery of tourism, growth is expected to continue. Nevertheless, many uncertainties remain, which may bring new challenges. This includes inflationary pressure, natural disaster, geopolitical tension, and the virus variants. Therefore, a plan to achieve a resilient and sustainable development is crucial to the region. We highly commend the achievements made by the CDB last year under the leadership of President Leon. In terms of its operations with a total approval of US$123 million new loans in 2021, the CDB has been an active contributor to the region's growth and resilience. In terms of its strategy, the CDB has incorporated social resilience, production resilience, environmental resilience, fiscal resilience, and institutional resilience into its strategic plan update 2020 to 2024. We appreciate the bank's bold efforts to manage the balance between economic recovery and sustainable development. The theme of this annual meeting is measure better to target better adaptation and resilience. Indeed, strengthening that stability and building resilience is of great importance. It will not only help cope with the many risks and challenges facing the region, but also promote high-quality development in the long run so as to achieve the objectives of the United Nations sustainable development goals. We welcome the bank's efforts to mobilize additional resources from both private sector and regional and international institutions to accelerate sustainable growth of foreign countries. We encourage the bank to fully leverage its convenient power and expertise in sustainable energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and digital transformation to help borrowing countries to cope with major challenges including food security, climate change, and COVID-19. As an integral part of the CDB family, non-regional members have been and will continue to be strong partners that the CDB can rely on. Together with other non-regional members, China attaches great importance to bilateral and multilateral cooperation with the Caribbean region through trade, investment, and cultural exchanges. With the support of the Belt and Road Initiative, we will maintain close cooperation with the CDB and all member states. Spare no efforts to support the CDB in key areas such as regional infrastructure, environmental protection, private sector development, poverty reduction, educational transformation, and the pandemic response. With that, we wish the annual meeting a complete success. Thank you. On behalf of the non-regional members, now I would like to call on the alternate Governor for the British Overseas Territories, the Honorable Dr. Alice Webster, Premier of Anguilla to give the report of the Procedures Committee. Protocol already established. Good morning. I feel like a vote of thanks is necessary for this beautiful session we've had this morning. We had, I'd like to thank the Chairman and of the Board of Governors, the Premier, Turks and Caicos Islands for the warm welcome and certainly the hospitality shown during this 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. You know, Ms. Robin Forbes, she raised the roof this morning with the Turks and Caicos National Song and certainly the Cadet Corps smartly dressed and are tired, marched the Governors in. I think that is befitting for this type of a gathering. I also would like to say yesterday the seminar that was put on met the theme, Measure Better, Target Better and interpreted by Mr. Ian Durant, Data-Driven Decision Making. That is important as we move forward and I would like to thank the Governor from the St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Honorable Camilla Gonzales, for nominating me as the reporting member and for your unanimous support for selecting me. Premier, I feel that I should run for seat here in this territory. It's the only time I've had unanimous consent. Mr. Chairman, Governors, Directors, the Procedures Committee met on Tuesday, June 14, 2022 at 9.30 a.m. and the report of this committee dated June 15, 2022 is before you. I have the honor to table the report on behalf of the committee and move that the Board of Governors adopt the recommendations contained therein. The report of the Procedures Committee. Mr. Chairman, the Procedures Committee met at 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday, June 14, 2022. Representatives are Trinidad and Tobago, also representing Haiti, Jamaica, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the People's Republic of China, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mexico, Antigua and Barbuda, Senkets and Nevis, Venezuela, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, also representing Grenada, United Kingdom, Suriname, St. Lucia, also representing the Commonwealth of Dominica, Belize, Turks and Caicos Islands, also representing Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Montserrat were present at the meeting. The committee submits the following report. One, schedule of the annual meeting. The committee agreed to the schedule of the meeting as set out in paper BG 52-1. Two, provisions relating to the conduct of the meeting. The committee recommends that the provisions relating to the conduct of the meeting embodied in paper BG 52-2 be approved. Three, the agenda for the meeting. The committee recommends the adoption of the agenda as circulated in paper BG 52-3. Regarding the items on the agenda, the committee reports on the following recommendations. A, annual report for 2021. The submission to governors of the annual report for 2021 was noted. B, audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors 2021. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-4 and the audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors contained in the annual report and recommends that the draft resolution entitled audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors 2021 be adopted. C, allocation of net income for the year ended December 31, 2021. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-5 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled allocation of net income for the year ended December 31, 2021 be adopted. D, administrative budget for the year ending December 31, 2022. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-6 entitled administrative budget for the year ending December 31, 2022 and recommends that governors note the budget. C, expenses of governors and alternates attending meetings of the Board of Governors or committees thereof. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-7 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled expenses of governors and alternates attending meetings of the Board of Governors or committees thereof be adopted. F, place and date of the 53rd 2023 annual meeting. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-8 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled place and date of the 53rd 2023 annual meeting be adopted. G, election of officers of the Board of Governors. The committee recommends that the governor for St. Lucia be elected as chairperson and the governors for Venezuela and Germany be elected as vice chair to hold their respective offices until the election of officers at the end of the 53rd that is in 2023 annual meeting of the Board of Governors and that the draft resolution entitled election of officers of the Board of Governors attach here to be adopted. H, selection of directors. The chairman will make a report to the Board of Governors and I, there being no other business, the committee meeting ended at 10 a.m. Continuing with the draft resolution attachment one draft resolution number they said they've heard enough of me so I won't read the resolutions they will be sent to your inbox. Thank you very much for your attention. H, selection of directors, accordance with paragraph 4 article 29 of the agreement establishing the Caribbean Development Bank, the following persons have been elected, selected as directors. Jamaica, Mrs. Joanna Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti, Mr. Simon Wilson, the Bahamas, Mr. Tarachand Belgobin from Guyana and Mr. Ian Carrington Barbados, Mr. Claudius Emmanuel St. Lucia and the Commonwealth of Dominica, Dr. Kevin Michael George, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Mr. Whitfield Harris and Tiga and Barbuda and St. Kidd's and Nevis, Mr. Usman Martinez, Belize and Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat and Turks and Caicos Islands and Ms. Iris Sandoval Suriname, Ms. Olga Lucia Micao from Colombia, Mr. Enrique Nevas from Venezuela, Mr. Manuel Alejandro Orientia Bostas from Mexico and Mr. Eduardo Pantes Vieira from Brazil, Ms. Sharon Peake from Canada, Ms. Stefan Kosoff, United Kingdom, Mr. Christian Thiel, Germany and Jin Zhuge from the People's Republic of China. Thank you very much. So I take it then that the recommendations set out in the report of the Procedure Committee are approved and the resolutions before the Board are adopted. Silence, give consent. I think we've kept you long enough and so at this juncture we'll come to a close on this section or element of our business for today and it just left for me to really extend my pleasure for you accepting our invitation, those of you and the audience and of course our governors, directors who've made it here from different parts of the region and the world for that matter. Thank you for being here and this part of the proceedings is now closed. What I would like also to do is to invite governors and directors to remain for the photograph opportunity and to say that to you that at 3 p.m. we look forward to your participation in the seminar on measuring vulnerability and resilience for small states and this will be held at the Beaches Resort at 3 p.m. And then you'll hear more about the recovery duration adjuster. So I think this is a very important aspect and you'll be able to drill deeper down into this whole concept of targeting better, I'm sorry, measuring better to target better. So I invite you, those of you who can make it, please be there. Thank you very much. This section is now closed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.