 Please be seated. Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Development and the Youth Economy, Hon. Philip J. Pierre. President of the Senate, Hon. Stanley Felix. Speaker of the House, Hon. Claudius Francis. Members of Cabinet, Senators, President of the Caribbean Development back, Dr. Hytenius Jean Leo. Permanent Secretaries, Government Officials, Officials from the Caribbean Development Bank, Officials from the University of the West Indies, the National Youth Council, Representatives from various non-governmental organizations, specially invited guests, Yves Van St. Lucia, the Government Information Service, the media. Welcome to this morning's proceedings. I am your mistress of ceremony, Monde-Louis Press Secretary to the Prime Minister. Ladies and gentlemen, you may be aware that the 52nd annual meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank in June of this year, our Prime Minister, Hon. Philip J. Pierre, who serves as the CDB Governor for St. Lucia, accepted the role of Chairman of the Board of Governors. In this capacity, the Prime Minister will serve as the host of the next annual meeting, which will be held here in St. Lucia in June 2023. The chairmanship affords the Prime Minister and in fact, the Government and the people of St. Lucia, a unique opportunity to partner with the Caribbean Development Bank to access a regional, and might I say, a global platform for advocacy and actions on issues and areas that are critical for the achievement of national and regional development objectives. The thematic focus of the upcoming annual meeting is marshalling finance for development, access to adequate and affordable financing, and great emphasis will be placed on accelerating investment for the region and advancing for the youth economy, developing future national and regional leaders and greater involvement of the private sector and indeed the citizen as a whole. In this development dialogue, this morning, we will hear more about the Prime Minister's vision for his chairmanship and plans for the 53rd annual meeting and how both of these elements will have a lasting impact on the region's sustainable development agenda. Before we begin the program, it is my pleasure to introduce the head table. To my left, I have Mr. Ajani Labon, the interim chairman of the St. Lucian National Youth Council. To his left, I have Dr. Hygienus Jean-Leo, President of the Caribbean Development Bank. Next, we have our very own Honorable Philip J. Pierre, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Development and the Youth Economy and the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. Next to him, we have Ms. Elica Frederick, Mobilization Officer for the St. Lucia National Youth Council. Once again, welcome everyone to this press launch of the 53rd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. I now invite you to view the screen for a video presentation. Putting youth first. Known as the Helen of the West Indies, St. Lucia is not only simply beautiful, but she inspires the best in her people. As her new cadre of global citizens navigates the economy, St. Lucia is poised to present opportunities for its people to innovate and excel as the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders, with access to affordable financing and resources to grow startups and to turn hobbies and talents into sustainable business ventures. A youth economy, both agile and flexible to provide opportunities. Through the boardroom, through mentorship, training and funding, we are investing in our people to become ambassadors wherever they may roam. The potential of our aspiring creatives and the promise of our emerging artists shape policy and continues to fuel St. Lucia's burgeoning orange economy. Investment in competitive grassroots sports programs and reliable sporting infrastructure propels the development of St. Lucia athletes elevating national standards. Thank you very much for indulging me. And I must say that this video was scripted, was the talent, was shot by everybody who... Hi, good morning, everyone. Before we begin, let me just acknowledge the presence of our student branch and the many student representatives and youth representatives, representatives of other youth organizations at this gathering this morning. The St. Lucia National Youth Council, a collective of youth-led and community-based organizations, firmly believes in shared prosperity for the St. Lucia people. Young people age 15 to 35 represent roughly 40% of the nation's population, while 60% of the region's population is under the age of 30. By virtue of this demographic and in recognition of youth's continued contribution to national development, it is imperative that our economic and social structures reflect this reality. Access to services is a key principle articulated in the St. Lucia National Youth Policy. This policy recognizes the need to provide equitable access to resources and services required to fulfill the physical, economic, social needs of young people. Today, several programs and institutions exist to educate, train, and empower our youth to take charge of their futures. The National Skills Development Center since 2002 has equipped thousands of young people with essential life and employability skills. Young entrepreneurs, owners of micro and small enterprises continue to receive business development support from the Small Business Development Center, formerly the Small Enterprise Development Unit and its network of powers, notably the St. Lucia Youth Business Trust and the St. Lucia Development Bank's Youth Enterprises Equity Fund. At the school level, the Junior Achievement Program has seen notable success in connecting young people, particularly students, to mentors and entrepreneurial skills training. The Sarfa-Lewis Community College and the Center for Adolescent Renewal and Education are undergoing major transformations to expand their reach and enhance youth's capacity through an industry-relevant education. Civil Society organizations and Centers for Rehabilitation also provide young people with access to opportunities for social mobility through social support, leadership, sports, second chance interventions, and spirituality. The existence of these services speaks to progress that has been made over the years to embrace and harness youth as innovators, change-makers, critical thinkers, communicators, and leaders. Notwithstanding, the reality exists for many of our young people that they are detached from the resources and opportunities on offer. This can be attributed to socioeconomic barriers such as low levels of literacy and financial stability, centralized services, low civic participation, and awareness. These challenges are compounded by popular perspectives emphasizing youth reform or the belief that youth issues originate with young people and that somehow through a suite of reactive interventions we can address these issues forthwith. With this backdrop, a renewed call for access to adequate and affordable financing for the Caribbean Development Bank's warring member countries can serve as a catalyst to efforts aimed to restructure local economies to better serve youth as key contributors. Strategic investments into young people offer the returns of sustainable and resilient economies. In St. Lucia and across all the BMCs, the key question is, how can authorities ensure that adequate and affordable financing translates into accessible and sustainable services for young people? The concept of a youth economy to turn hobbies into entrepreneurship and skills to business speaks to a critical and timely policy shift which demands coordination across various fronts. We anticipate that the development of the youth economy leads to a broader discussion on youth and their participation in the economy and the related issues of youth mainstreaming, resource distribution, inclusion and education. As previously said, for years prior, entrepreneurial services, support services have existed to nurture ideas and startups into viable business models. Hence, considering the relatively unsatisfactory levels of youth economic participation presented by indicators of youth unemployment, registered youth businesses and adolescent poverty, we argue that the issue isn't merely a deficiency of programs but the inability of our system to sufficiently empower youth and enhance the coordination of existing services for increased access. Outcomes one through three of the CDB's youth policy and operational strategy outlines a roadmap through which we can achieve optimal youth economic participation. That is, through youth mainstreaming, active democratic participation and intersectionality. At the foundation, this calls for us to address long-standing gaps in research and data collection for evidence-based decision making. In assessing the impact of national entrepreneurial supports, the youth policy draft highlights a lack of quantitative and qualitative evidence of meeting the diverse needs of the youth population across rural to urban Sinusha. We must expand our qualitative research capacity. We must seek to develop accurate knowledge on how young people think and the impediments to accessing support services. It is further necessary to ensure legislative coherence, enabling a favorable environment for young people and youth enterprises to be conceptualized, registered and skilled. We refer to four key policy areas for review. Number one, financial services. A review of bank lending policies towards more favorable lending arrangements, such as the recognition of movable assets as security for youth enterprises. Increased incentives for private sector investment into startups, among other pertinent matters. Number two, affordable housing. The fast tracking and the expanding of state initiatives get towards providing accessible and climate resilient housing at favorable rates for young people. Number three, educational reform. A review of policy to address the education system to labor force skills mismatch by promoting alternative learning pathways and ensuring education on industry-relevant skills of digital and financial literacy, leadership, critical thinking, social consciousness and innovation. This is critical as young people, youth businesses also require well-trained employees for their scalability. Number four, social protection. Comprehensive and equitable social protection frameworks, enabling vulnerable and fringe populations to access special financial services and tailored training programs. The current fifth industrial revolution presents a golden opportunity to an economic restructuring where young people are actively supported as the drivers of emerging industries. The St. Lucia National Youth Council calls for the recognition of young innovators as pioneers for a resilient St. Lucia. The public service is urged to pilot these innovations for scalability and to increase private sector confidence to invest into young entrepreneurs. For us, optimal youth economic participation calls for a decentralization of power in society for the equitable distribution of the country's resources. We are elated to join the series of events leading up to next year's Board of Governors meeting and look forward to discussions that will inform the strategic financing of youth enterprise and development. We take this time to congratulate Prime Minister Hon. Philip J. Pierre on the chairmanship of the CDB Board of Governors and we pledge our organization's support to increasing youth's access to developmental opportunities. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Labon and Ms. Frederick and thank you for being partners with the Government of St. Lucia and the Caribbean Development Bank. No stranger to St. Lucia. Also, like I proudly like to say, a son of St. Lucia, I know the region has adopted him, but I would now like to invite Dr. Hygienus Jean-Ley or President of the Caribbean Development Bank to deliver remarks. Good morning, everyone. I don't intend to use up good real estate to call the names of every body here, but let me just say protocols observed and I'll acknowledge, of course, Honorable Prime Minister and the members of cabinet that are here, the youth that are both on the podium in the audience, distinguished guests and online audiences. So let me probably first start off. I'm gonna change the metric here. No script. So let's just have a chat, keep it light. Let me first begin by acknowledging that it is more than a distinct pleasure that I am here to speak on home soil leading up to the annual meeting, which will be my third, but first in St. Lucia. And I think for me, it rises to a different level. Everything goes on to this annual meeting because it is a meeting for St. Lucia, in St. Lucia, but not for St. Lucia for the entire world. And I think that's the level we are raising this annual meeting for. It's about promoting the Caribbean, the region in the global space. And I cannot think of a better place to do it than St. Lucia. And why do I say that? Maybe we should do this in pure St. Lucia style. Why don't I tell you a team, team, a little story? And then we can see it from that perspective. Did the story started with, I wanna say Sir Arthur Lewis, because we can think of him as the father of the CDP, the father of the entire development space that we inherited. And I think if we fast forward 52 years after the, let's imagine a region where everybody cannot be rich, but where we have sustainable livelihoods. And sustainable in the sense of being able to have everything you want, being able to enjoy a certain level of welfare that you can identify as being there. Second, that you have economies that are resilient. Resilient in the sense that they can withstand shocks when shocks occur, whether it's climate, whether it's external, they can bounce back. A region that is in all sense, in other words, connected. Connected in physical, connected in digital, connected in cultural space, that we can genuinely say we are one. And if we have that basic sense about us, we can start thinking, well, a region that now can be at the forefront of innovation, that can lead, can drive the way for an entire people and maybe lead the world in that particular space. Now, if we think of this as the vision that we are looking to aspire to get to, then the question really is how can we get there? And I want to walk you down maybe what I think and what we have been promoting at the bank of three elements of that vision. Because that defines what we are gonna be talking about at the annual meeting. It will define how we map across a chart for the region. The first is we need to be able to have activities, investment activities that can meet goals that address our challenges. So it starts with a challenge. The challenge has a goal. And now we need to know what are the investment activities that can generate that goal. And that boils down to effectively, how do we utilize knowledge and knowledge creation, which I have called the industrialization of knowledge as a means of creating a warehouse, a bank of investment opportunities that can be translated into investment activities that can meet the purpose of solving our challenges. And I can quickly give you at least six challenges that I think we need to be able to address. And we can call them six goals. Food security, water security, from portable to sanitation to solid waste management. We can think of energy security as necessary and critical. Shelter security, education security, and health security. If you can just think of those six goals as meeting the challenges of development that we have, we can begin to think of development as a people issue where we can focus on elevating the level of welfare to talk about now the sustainable livelihoods that we talk about. Now, if we can get that into place, we need to first wrap our heads around one thing. Governments or the model of governments delivering on this is past. It is history. It is not feasible. And so we have to first change our mindset. Governments cannot do those things, should not be expected to do those things, but we cannot leave it either up to the private sector to do it. What we need and what I would wanna put on the table is we need now a new model of a partnership for development between the public and the private sectors that can work together to address those goals, to actually get us to addressing and achieving the challenges that we talk about, overcoming those challenges. So that's the first leg of the three things that I wanna talk about. A partnership in development that can promote adequate and quality investment activities that can meet the goals we can agree on, that can therefore overcome the challenges that we face as a people. So that's the first. The second is even after we get all of those investment activities there, you cannot do anything in today's modern economy without finance, which now takes us to the second, maybe most important problem we face. And we've dubbed it access to adequate and affordable finance. It has to be adequate, meaning it has to be enough and it must be affordable, because if it is not affordable, we end up in a debt trap that we cannot get out of. So that becomes the single most focus that we wanna be able to address. And so we've made this the theme for 2023's annual meeting, which translates to starting from now, all the way through June of next year, we wanna be mounting a number of activities that can help address the issue. We will not get there overnight, but start to work towards addressing the issue of access to adequate and affordable finance. Now that has two components that I wanna briefly touch on. The first is it must be multi-source. Multi-source means one, there has to be our own efforts. And what I mean by own efforts is national savings must be raised. In other words, we have to generate our own finance. The second is we must mobilize private sector finance. There is talk of private sector finance in the region. How do we mobilize that to add to that pot? The third is we need to get more concessional finance. That's the affordability part. And that's an advocacy issue. How do we as a region get access to more of the concessional finance? And the fourth part to this is there is already a large pool of concessional finance that exists. How do we get more out of it? And a very large part of that pivots around an issue that we face. And that is access to concessional finance in general is dependent upon our per capita gross national income. What that translates to is all of our countries in the region are deemed to be too rich to be able to access concessional finance. And so what we need to work on and CDB is working studiously at this is to come up with an alternative mechanism that would say we can access finance because of our vulnerabilities and resilience capacity, our ability to bounce back. That does not rely on the progress we have made which is that we have attained by increasing our GNI to the point that we no longer qualify for concessional finance. We should not be paying the price of progress. And so we need to find a way of getting the international community to be able to help deploy concessional finance in that particular way. The second component although it is multi-source is it has to be multi-instrument. We cannot assume that all finance is equal. And therefore we need to be able to distinguish the terms you have for finance for rescue operations. For example, after a hurricane hit, you cannot say you are getting money on the same terms as the terms you will get finance on if you are in recovery mode after the cleanup has occurred in the rescue operation. And it cannot be the same terms as you need for longer term finance to help you position yourself in a totally different space. And so that then becomes the three measures that we need to do. And we need to start thinking of designing instruments such that these instruments are internally consistent in the sense that they hang together at any one point in time. But at the same time, they are what we call temporally consistent in that the decisions and terms that you have in the short term does not become a problem in the long term. And so we should be coming up with a financing engineering type of idea that utilizes the combined sources we have with the different types of instruments we can master that remain internally coherent and at the same time, temporally consistent. I think that's the challenge that we have to face on development. The third leg that I wanna talk about is the bigger issue of implementation. So I have the projects, I have the finance. How do I actually deliver? And that's the biggest problem I think that we face. And that has, I want to proffer three components. The first is the relationship with the government. I had already told you that we need to have a partnership between the public and the private sector. So relationship with the government becomes an important part of that partnership. How do we craft that? How do we agree on it becomes an important element. The second is we need a monitoring and evaluation system. And by that I mean we need to know where we are. We need to know where we are going. And we need to be able to monitor across that space at each point, what progress we are making, why we are not making the progress and how do we pivot, adapt, be nimble enough to stay on track. So that whole system is what I talk about in terms of a distance to a goal metric where whether it's an SDG or some other element we have a distinct idea of where we wanna be and then we measure it. And that now is a large part of where we focused last year. We said we need to measure better to target better. That was the theme of last year's annual meeting. If we do not understand, we do not measure, we don't know how we are making progress, there is no way we can target. And so that's a large part we've done this and we've pivoted now to the financing part. And the third element of that implementation I think is what I am calling the nation psyche. Our mindset, what is our role? And I'm glad we have you fair because the baton is switching to you. And I don't, to be honest, like the idea of this is youth's problem or this is youth's perspective. No, it is a transition. We are in a continuum and we are moving from the young future leaders to the current leaders. Because you are youth today, trust me, in five years time you will probably no longer be called youth but does that mean your work is any different or less no? So let us think of the future leaders. And so once we put it in that mindset, it is not about you, it is about the future of the country. It is about the future of the region, it's about the future of the world. And so everything that you're doing I think should be looked at as an investment in tomorrow not as solving youth's problems because there will always be youth. And when you say you're solving youth's problems, the youth of today, when you get to solve it, it will not be about your problems, it will mean now the youth of tomorrow. And it will be a totally different mindset. So the mindset issue of we are our own keepers, not for ourselves but for tomorrow, the future. Is that future sense that I think we need to embrace and to embrace it from a perspective of innovation? And therefore in the investment in learning, we should be pricing three characteristics. Enquiry, having a question mark always in everything we do. Second is discovery, what does the information around me say? And the third is transformative strategies. We should never see knowledge and information for its own sake. It has to be for its utility, its use to generate transformation. And so what I'd like the youth, let's say future leaders to think a little more about is how do we inculcate in our kids from kindergarten to the grave? Education should never stop. Kindergarten to the grave. A sense of inquiry and discovery and problem solving that is the entire ethos. That is what will generate the innovative spirit and the psyche of the nation that will actually take us to that next step. So those are the three elements that I think we need to focus on. The investment, activities needed to solve goals to address our challenges. Mobilizing, finance to make this a reality and implementing governance, implementation that will allow us to deliver on meeting those challenges that we face. And that's the message that the CDB is putting out there. That's the message I would like to see promoted throughout this year. It's the message I would like to see come out of the annual meeting when we meet next year here in St. Lucia. A message that St. Lucia's can take to heart. A message that the region can see they took from the demonstration by St. Lucia's for the region. And a message that maybe even the world may want to adopt that this is something worthy of development that we should be thinking about. But it's all rooted in the one last point I want to leave you with. Development is not about a slice. Development is a holistic process that addresses all parts of us. We as people, and we have emotional, social, and other needs. The country as a place where activity takes place. The planet where we all live and utilize resources and so we should always be thinking when we talk of development economic, we should be thinking social, we should be thinking institutional, we should be thinking environmental, and we should be thinking financial. It has to be all of those combined in a way that stands together to help us to go through. So in closing, that's why we are launching this initiative. And throughout the year, there will be activities and I'm hoping a lot of it will focus on the youth or the future leaders of the region, not just St. Lucia, the region leading up to the idea of a very, very big, if you want high points of promoting future leaders as the transition point for our future going forward. So with that, thank you. So very much. Thank you, Dr. Leo. After Prime Minister and I were in Texan Caicos for the 52nd annual meeting, all I kept hearing was no pressure for putting on next year's annual meeting. And this time, like Dr. Leo says, it's not going to be three to five days, it's a year of activities. So I'm sure I'll be seeing you all very often for the year if Dr. Leo and Miss Power has their way. A little story about Dr. Leo. In 2013, he presented the independence lecture, responsibility of transformation. And at that time, he served as the IMF rep for Jamaica. Now he is with us in the region. We have him all to ourselves. And I know if I know anything about him, it is that he will marshal us, push us into getting the work done, very meaningful work. And I hope that we all can play our part in the other year's activity. But thank you again, Dr. Leo. It is now my honor to call on Honorable Philip J. Pierre, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Development and the Youth Economy and also the Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Caribbean Development Bank. Prime Minister. Thank you very much. After this lecture by the President, the last time I heard a lecture like that, I was somewhere at the University and that was years ago. So there's nothing much I could say. I could just say good morning and have a good day. Let me recognize the members of the Cabinet of St. Lucia, the President of the Caribbean Development Bank, members of the National Union of Consents, President and Executive Members, Staff of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, Senate Stanley Felix, President of the Senate and your Honorable Claudia S. Francis, Speaker of the House, Members of the Press, Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning. On behalf of the government and people of St. Lucia, I welcome you to this media lunch of the annual meeting which will be hosted in St. Lucia in June 2023. Allow me to welcome President Jean Leo to his home country, St. Lucia. While I look forward to hosting the bank's flagship event, the annual meeting, I'm equally keen on using this year of my chairmanship to add voice and give visibility to key aspects of the bank's program which I believe of critical importance to the development of St. Lucia and the rest of the region. In fact, President, I'm happy to answer your call for Governors of the Bank to play a more active role in the workings of the bank, the challenges of this region and to overcome if we work collectively as a people. When I graciously accepted the chair at the close of the 52nd annual meeting in the Tixant Kakers, I noted that my one-year tenure will be defined by finding solutions for difficult times. If there is one lesson to be learned from the pandemic and the ongoing fallout from the Russian-Ukrain conflict is that the sooner we understand and expect that difficult times may now be more the norm than the exception. The sooner we set about focusing our resilience to ensure that no matter the degree of difficulty, we have what it takes to chart a sustainable life for our people. In this vein, I'll be using and 25% between 10 to 24 years. Given this large youth demographic, the potential contribution to social and economic development is significant. However, for this potential to be realized, optimal engagement of our youth in the economy is imperative. Unemployment and poor economic participation remain serious concerns among our youth. Unemployment rates for persons 15 to 24 years old in the region generally range from 18% to 47%. An average youth unemployment is more than three times that of adult unemployment. The situation is the most severe for young women. The situation is further compounded by the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which further reduced prospects of employment. It is important that an environment is created for young people to be allowed the opportunity to engage in the activities that they enjoy. Our education system must be adjusted to reduce the mismatch between the skills required for the workforce and the skills available to our youth. Despite greater access to education and healthcare than previous generations, the primary agents of change are the key to reform and to build our region. They possess on much levels of innovation and creativity, and in them we can find the solution to some of our developmental challenges and emerging opportunities. In solution, my government is committed to investing in our future for the creation of a youth economy, which we believe will propel the sustainable development of our country. We hope to convert hobbies into entrepreneurship and skills into business. In so doing, we are focused on youth entrepreneurship and business growth for the establishment of an agile specialized agency, the youth economy agency, or YE, for the provision of financial and technical assistance. Our aim is to harness and channel the untapped innovation, creativity, and to foster the emergence of a truly transformational youth economy. It's my desire to see this and similar potions take root across the region. I stand ready to look at the CDB, especially in the context of its youth policy and operational strategy to which our local efforts here in St. Lucia are very aligned. In relation to access to adequate and affordable financing, which I note will also be the theme for next year's annual meeting, it is well accepted that given our prevailing debt sustainability constraints, our region needs to develop new and innovative financing mechanisms to foster social, economic, and environmental resilience. The classification of many of our countries as middle and high income, solely on the basis of the capital, gross national income, the GNI, is devoid of consideration for inherent vulnerability to environmental and economic shocks and our low propensity for speedy recovery. This has significantly constrained access to much needed concessional resources to fund development priorities, such as mitigation of and adoption to climate change. It is for this reason that St. Lucia is firmly behind the innovative work being undertaken by the Caribbean Development Bank to develop the recovery duration adjuster that seeks to incorporate a resilience adjusted gross national income measure to determine access to concessionary finance in closing. I reiterate my support for the president of the bank and the work of the Caribbean Development Bank. I look forward to a year of intense work on behalf of the people of the region, and we in St. Lucia are ready to welcome the membership of the bank to which I anticipate will be a highly successful annual general meeting in 2023. I thank you. Thank you, Prime Minister, for these remarks and just to reiterate, St. Lucia is looking forward to partnering with the Caribbean Development Bank and all our partners, UETV, the St. Lucia National Youth Council and all the various non-governmental organizations present here. Welcome and thank you for coming. We will now move to the question and answer segment of the program. So we have placed a mic in the center. So anyone from the media and my Jesse, maybe guests who have any burning questions can direct the questions to both President Dr. Leo and Honorable Prime Minister Pierre. So the mic is open and we're also engaging media on a Zoom platform so you will see or hear them rather asking questions. If you cannot hear, I will repeat, I should get my phone, I will repeat the question via a message. So anyone to start off with questions, please? The mic is here and I will go via Zoom. Okay. Please state your name and the media house that you're representing. Thank you very much. Yes, good day. Reginald Andrew, the voice publishing. Dr. Leo, it was a very informative lecture, like we said. Now there's one area that I particularly want you to give a little briefing on. You spoke of the, to meet the challenges of development that we'd have to elevate a level of welfare to sustain livelihoods. So when you speak generally, it would take in different sectors of the society, from the fishermen to the farmers, to the schools, to the students, you know, the public sector. How would you, how would that, how would you generate a sort of, are you saying a correspondence between these different units, these different agencies to bring about that level of progress, synergy like this? Yeah, there is no, there is no mapping as such. What we are making is two statements. The first is that one of, one of the elements that define an improvement in the development space is that people, everybody, have what we can call broadly sustainable livelihoods. And the underlying word is sustainable. Meaning, livelihoods that you have and livelihoods include your entire way of living, your economic, your social, your access to services, your general well-being. That that is sustainable, meaning you can keep it and can continue it at a certain level going forward. Not it is there today and tomorrow it's down. So as the first thing is a sustainable livelihood will define the goal that we are looking to achieve to be able to state that we are developing or we have developed, that's the first. So it applies to everybody. The second point is how do you measure that? And I think that is maybe the bigger issue you are trying to ask. It is not going to be do the students have and do the farmers have, everybody has to have else we cannot have sustainability. But as I said, sustainability in itself cannot be at one level where you say everybody is rich because if everybody is rich then you cannot distinguish rich and poor, there is no distinction. So there will always be levels of sustainability but at the very minimum we should be able to define what is a minimum level of sustainability and a concept of fairness and equity in society that everybody has but there will always be, we cannot get around that, there will always be gradations of some people having more than others but that's a fact of modern living. I don't think you can get around that. Okay and just one more follow up to the prime minister. Prime minister, you place a lot of emphasis on the youth economy and you also mentioned that there will be a youth department or youth unit within that structure. Can you just briefly outline what is somebody, the key persons that would be involved in that department or that unit? Just bring them your head or chairman or whatever. If I do that I'll be prejudiced people will apply. Well I didn't know, I thought it was said already. Now okay, what we will have is a statutory board that will conduct the business of an agency called the DEA, the Youth Economy Agency. And the reason why we do it in that way is we want to have a flexible organization, flexible agile so it will have its own board, its own rules, its own regulations because we want to limit the frustration that young people have when they look for finance. Most times when young people go for finance they ask them experience collateral business plans, et cetera. They will need to have that but initially a young person who has an idea and needs sometimes between two to five thousand dollars you can ask them for a business plan, ask them for collateral. So what we're going to do is we're going to be helping these people with smaller ones of money in the beginning whilst they develop so that it's not, I'm going to be free next money, like we're not going to be just giving money out. We're going to assist with a grant for those who are just starting which will graduate into a loan at some point. But the idea is to have access to finance but that doesn't come without training or mentorship. You can't just come in and just get money. There is a process but you want to make it easier and affordable for young people to be able to get in a pretty quick manner what they need to start their businesses. Thank you very much Mr. Andrew. I have one question from Zoom and then we'll continue. I take it that's me, thank you very much. Peter Richards, Caribbean Media Corporation in Barbados. Mr. Prime Minister, you're saying and other Prime Ministers have said it in the past, the need for new and to quote you, new and innovative and financing mechanism, I'm sorry, and mechanism to deal with the debt sustainability in the region. As one of the new Prime Ministers, do you have any specific strategy that you would like to discuss? Yeah, sure. As I said, the CDB, they're working on RDA which basically means that they want to align our vulnerability to our financial needs. You can't expect what is happening now is that the world measures our credit, what they call our credit in terms of a GNI which is a gross national income. And that means if you have a few people who are very wealthy and many who are very poor, the average would mean that the country would seem to be very rich. But that is not the case because any one of our islands, we can get up at any day in the week and find that we have a hurricane that has wiped out the entire country. It is happening in Dominica. It has happened in Grenada. It is happening in Jamaica, et cetera. So what do you want to have? We want to have a measure which the CDB is working on which says, listen to me, if you are seeking finance, other factors must be taken into consideration. Your vulnerability and how quickly you can recover from a disaster. This is what we are speaking of. What do you speaking of? New methods of seeking finance for our region. I think Dr. Lea will definitely say that it is going up against problems from even the United Nations and other developed countries. I don't think that's the case, Peter. When you say it's going up against problems, I don't associate with that. The issue is that the world, not the UN, the world has been struggling with this idea that GNI is not an appropriate measure of development and therefore not an appropriate measure of access to finance for development for the last maybe 35 years. We have not produced a solution to it yet. And where we are now is that the world has agreed we do need to find a way around it. And so there's been a lot of work that has been done under the concept of the MVI, the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index. So the CDB idea is within that same space as a multidimensional vulnerability index, except that we have broadened the concept to be able to distinguish vulnerabilities that you have, which is before an event actually occurs and vulnerabilities that you have after an event occurs and those vulnerabilities must change after a crisis occurs. But when you have that change in vulnerability, then what happens is your ability to recover after that crisis becomes prolonged. And therefore it is not possible to actually use the vulnerability alone before as a means of arguing that this is the entirety of how you will determine your access to finance. So that's the key point that we have been trying to do. In other words, we are using two elements here. The first dimension of looking at vulnerabilities, what we can call a definitional dimension. You could say you have economic vulnerability, you have social vulnerability, you have environmental vulnerability. These are multiple factors that influence vulnerability. But there's another part to vulnerability that is not included in standard measures of vulnerability indices, which is the temporal side. In other words, the pre and the post, the ability to recover, the static before and the dynamic of changing. So that other part, when you put it in, defines as it were a multi-dimensional, multi-factor view that says what you want to really measure is a country's internal capacity for resilience. Now if you have that, then what you end up with is you say every country in the world has a internal resilience capacity. But countries like ours, the developing countries, the SIDS, have lower resilience capacity. And the capacity is lower because when a hurricane hits, it destroys essentially the entire country. When you have a shock like we have now, the price shock of the Ukraine war, it has untold impacts on your country. So irrespective of whatever policies the government of the day is doing, its ability to come out of that impact is prolonged, is more difficult. And therefore, even if your risk is higher, markets are giving you the wrong end of the stick because what they are doing in effect is to say your risk is higher, therefore the price of money is higher. But it is at the time when you need most assessment, you need concessional because it is, you need the money to help get you out of the problem that you have. And it is almost axiomatic. It doesn't matter how rich or how poor you are. If a hurricane goes through the region, every country gets the same hit. It doesn't distinguish, it's like COVID. It doesn't distinguish if you have 10,000, 5,000 or 20,000 GNI. But having gotten hit, the international markets will say, well, you started at 20,000 and because you are 20,000, you are rich. Therefore you cannot get concessional finance. But after that hurricane passes, you can't claim you still have 20,000 per capita GNI. It must have fallen. It must have fallen. Therefore we need to have a different measure of pre and post crisis to talk about what is a fair and equitable way of actually addressing the issue of access to finance. And so I think Peter to get back to the point you're making. There is a lot of support in the international community for the concepts that I am talking about. And I've been on the circuit throughout the year promoting it and I can tell you the international community doesn't disagree. What we do need now is to be able to get to the point where you have total acceptance such that you can get approval at the level of United Nations. That can now say this is where the world wants to be able to operate. And let's agree on modalities. There will obviously be differences because everybody sees this thing in a different way. But that is where advocacy comes into play. The countries are the region, the heads of state of the region going into United Nations General Assembly in September should be making that point of advocacy that this at least we don't have to claim it is the holy grail. It advances our prospects for getting access to finance on better terms than GNI. And therefore seeds developing countries stand to benefit from the integration of vulnerability and resilience into measures of determining how you access finance for development. I hope that clarifies for you, Peter. Thank you, Dr. Irwin. Thank you, Mr. Richard for your question. We have a question from the floor. Please remember to state your name and identify your media house. Good morning. Good morning. My name is David Jordan, Caribbean News Global. My question is actually directed both to the president of the bank and the prime minister. Good morning. The theme of your launch focuses on the marshalling finance for development. It seems to suggest that there's a new Marshall plan to solve all the myriad of problems that we face in the Caribbean. I know this is not so, but at the same time whilst narrowing on the issue of access to adequate and affordable financing is extended both to the private sector as well as the public sector. I am raising an issue here that one, I subscribe to your theory. I've heard it more than once. So I've actually been following you on president of the bank. And part of the issue is that we in the OECS, and the questions I've raised before, we in the OECS are actually out of the full gamut of access. I may not necessarily want to raise the institution, but I've been told by the leaders in the Caribbean, even the institution, Carey Carey Come, that it is costly for the OECS to access that particular institution, whereas in fact the other member states access it reasonably both in the context of getting the capital as well as elements for training, as a consequence of not being members of the body and the argument that there is an excuse of cost. We find ourselves eliminated, not embraced within that framework so as to access concessionary financing. And if I could say that the institution is I, you would know which bank it is. Having stated that, it means therefore the approach on the theory that you have developed. And I wish I was privy to this type of lectures earlier, but we have not changed our approach in terms of transformational economics. And I am happy that we associate with this. The issue here is that if we have access to these multi-sector institutions or multi-approach that we could adopt, it means therefore we'll be well placed just like our larger developed members to access funding at reasonable rates and less onerous conditions. Now that being stated, it would mean therefore your theory, Dr. Leo, begs the question of our ability to access those institutions, and that of course, what is the bank about to do within that period since you started your tenure to enable OECS territories? And I know you ought not to appear to be partisan or partial in your approach. What opportunities are there for us to be part of that whole framework? Noting full well that even within member states or the members of the bank, you have issues of inability to implement the capital projects while they do the budgeting each year because here comes the whole issue that you have addressed, mindset and so on, and how you approach financing because nobody's going to give you financing without your plans and your ability to implement, your capacity to implement. So that addresses for which I will move directly to the Prime Minister. It is all good and well to focus on the question of youth economy. But I'm aware larger territories, larger countries also embrace the wisdom and mindset of the persons who have been exposed, not necessarily the brightest, but they too have a role to play in terms of merging that effort. So whilst you have proposed the youth economy, I know there's a task for that body when set up to develop policies, programs and so on, but it's how do you integrate this with the experience of what currently exists as an asset? Thank you. I'll answer you first because the chairman, the president of Dolores, the four aspects of the youth economy. Training, finance, marketing and mentoring. So that is where we're going to use the experience of people who have been there before, who have been successful, and they can discuss with the youth the methods that they use to see how we can marriage, we can marry the two ideas or the three or four ideas in something sustainable for the person themselves. So mentoring is actually there. David, good to see you. I don't think I've seen you for the last, probably near 40 years or thereabouts. I want to repeat something I said because I think you may have taken it a little out of context. The first is at the level of foundational principle, foundational principle, all development ought to be, I don't want to say is, ought to be about what do you need to do to achieve a goal that overcomes your main challenge. And because challenges are naturally integrated, I made the point that development therefore cannot be a sliced problem. It has to be a holistic problem. To be able to address any of the goals that we are talking about, any of them, you need to have modalities to address it. And I use the term investment activities because you need to invest in some form to address a goal. Whether it's invest in education to address an investment goal or invest in infrastructure to address your connectivity problem or invest in say MSMEs or youth to address the problem of diversification. These are activities for goals. Once you have agreed on those, the point I was making is, you cannot on the line cannot, cannot do anything in any economy, OECS or not, without finance. That is the automatic point in any economy. You need finance. That finance has two dimensions. It has to be adequate, meaning I cannot solve a $1 billion problem with $10,000. You won't solve it, has to be adequate, meaning a $1 billion problem requires a $1 billion of finance. And it must be affordable. Yes, I can get $1 billion to solve my $1 billion problem, but if it is going to come at a cost, that means I'm now perpetually in debt, then I have not solved my problem. So hence why we said access, meaning how do I have access to adequate, quantum and affordable finance. That's the bottom line. Foundation, I think no one can query that. Once you get to that point, that's why I think you made the, I don't want to call it an error, but it's getting there. You made the point of limiting the access to finance to IFIs or MDBs. MDBs, IFIs, international financial institutions are only one of the potential sources that you can have of finance. And hence why I said you can have own generated funds, you can have private sector generated funds, you can have concessional funds, and you can use concessional that you already have and use it more effectively. All of those contribute to now the pool of funds that you have. And so the only issue now is how do I get access to those? And the access to those because it is a pool does not have to be only through what you call the unnamed institutions, doesn't have to come with the architecture of lending from those institutions. We are talking now how do you create instruments that can be deployed to meet the goals of development, having now mobilized, mobilized that pool of resources. So that is the theme that we are talking about. When we say martial, there's nothing about the martial plan. It's a simple verb. Martialing, mobilizing, bringing together. Adequate and appropriate finance. Such that we can access it, but access it with a purpose. And the purpose is the purpose of development. And that development has to be the challenges that we are looking to overcome. And what are the agreed goals that will indicate that we have overcome those challenges and working backwards. What it is that we need to do to actually get there. It's a process that we are describing. So I don't think we should be conflating that with the idea of the internal infrastructure around borrowing or financing from international financial institutions or those that OECS members are members too and those that they are not. It doesn't really matter. All we are saying is that we can mobilize resources and we want to be able to access those resources we would have mobilized, such that we can deploy them with a purpose, the purpose being the purpose of development. Thank you very much. Dr. Leo and thank you very much. Mr. Jordan, we have to take another, you've had two questions. You're allowed one question and a follow up. Thank you. But we have to move along. Our last question for this morning's presentation, Ms. Alfred. So Lajalfred, HTS News Force. My question is for you, Prime Minister, first and foremost. What is the strategy that will be looked to be implemented for the youth economy to ensure that access to funding reaches the bloc to fast track them to the boardroom? The answer to that is communication. We will have to get there and speak to people almost like a campaign. You see, the problem with the bloc is the problem of trust. The people in the bloc do not trust the system. They think the system takes too long and the system always conspires against them. So we have to communicate. We have to make them understand that this thing is for you and as the president says, you are the future leaders even if you are on the bloc now. And that takes me to another issue of people being stigmatized because of where they live. And this is something we really have to deal with. Your dress should not determine your character or your future. And the ghetto should not be a ghetto. In fact, the ghetto is in your mind and not where you live. So it's communication, that's how we're going to deal with it. And my follow-up question is for Dr. Leo. You spoke of connection within the region and you also mentioned that investment activities must meet the goals that address challenges. A major talking point has been that of regional travel. Now you just spoke of the solution being accessing adequate quantum financing. Do you believe we as a region will be able to tap into such financing to address regional travel issues? Yeah, I believe in one simple edict. We need to create our future. That's the only way we can predict it is if we can create it. And so let's not think of access to finance as a passive activity. It is not. Access to finance is an active activity, proactive activity that we now need to say what do we need to do, what do we need to create such that we have the financing that will lead to the goal as you rightly say, of addressing the challenge of connectivity. Connectivity is a major challenge. Whether it is physical, marine, air, road, connectivity at the physical level is a challenge. Connectivity digital is a challenge. How do we ensure that the entire region is connected? Cultural, how do we get past the narrow sense of I am Saint Lucia and Saint Lucia alone and anything that goes beyond Saint Lucia I don't care. That is a problem. So when we say connectivity, we are talking about all dimensions of connectivity as the challenge. What we need is to work backward. What is the goal? A goal may very well be having a air network system that can serve the entire region in the sense of providing the means through which any of our peoples can move from one place to the next. Goods can be transported from one place to the next at a price that is affordable. Now that's the goal. Once we agree on that goal, the question now becomes how? What are the investment activities that need to be undertaken and how do we finance them? So that now is the access to finance. And I'm saying that finance is not going to just land on your lap, we have to create it. When we create it, now we can deploy it. And we can deploy it for the goal at hand, which we can measure to address the challenge at hand. That becomes a development project. I know, thank you very much everyone for your questions. I know when Dr. Leo is on the floor, it feels like an educational time. And I know everyone is very keen on learning more about the youth economy. So we have, this is a great starting point for our press launch, not our lecture, but thank you everyone for your interest. We will take that last question from Zoom and that's it everyone. I just want to ask Dr. Leo, in regard to what he was saying there, what then is his advice for Caribbean governments going forward with regards to Liat? Peter, you are being as mischievous as always. Now, I don't have specific advice to governments about Liat. If I can offer any advice to governments, it would be let us work together to agree on a goal that can address the challenge of connectivity in all of its lines and let us create, I want to repeat the word create, the investment opportunities and that's both the activity and the financing that will allow us to overcome the transportation issues that we face in the region. And I can equally say to you, it is not impossible. We need to get out of the impossibility trap that nothing is possible. Everything is possible. We just have to be creative enough. And if we do that and we are committed to finding solutions, I think we can find solutions. So therefore you should show them that creativity trap. You should deal with that creativity trap then. Of course we can deal with the creativity trap. It means coming up with ideas that people can consider. Okay, thank you, Mr. Richards. I have a very eager young lady in the front who wants to ask a question. So I will allow her and then that's the last last. Thank you very much. Okay, so thank you for your grace in granting me the opportunity to ask the question. So... Neyman. Oh, sorry. My name is Seanna Dal. So I happen to be the interim president of the Sino-Sino-National Students Council, but it's a personal question. I'm not asking on behalf of them. So my question is, you know, considering that the tourism industry is one that's ever expanding and employment in that industry seems to be seasonal. I want to know how is it that we support, I guess, our responsibility to provide a labor force to that industry at the same time as we try to promote the youth economy? Do you understand the question or should I rephrase it? I'm trying. I'm trying. You see, the industry, part of the main issues around the industry is that not enough of the tourism dollar remains in the island, right? It's estimated that probably 50% or even more than that lives the country. What I want young people to try to do, or to do, which I'm sure they can, is to look for innovative means so that the million people who come to St. Lucia and the millions who travel and come to the region, they can find something apart from a t-shirt for a tourist to get in St. Lucia. Very simple things. I sort of simple things, like hair braiding. Tourists like to get their hair braided, some of them. They can develop a whole industry around that. The business of pedicurin and manicurin, what about a manicurin? Because young people or people who have nails, you put something like a piton in the pitons, right? In arts and crafts, can we not create a nice choreographed festival like La Wars or La Magovite and you have a dance, et cetera, when the cruise passengers go to Souffre so they stop someone on the way and you have that kind of production? What do you have to think of? And this is why young people are the ones who are going to buy the forefront of that. To find some innovative way for tourists to keep, to spend the money in St. Lucia. If you do that and you can sustain that kind of momentum, you will find tourists coming to St. Lucia for these different events. And what that means is that you can probably change the kind of tourists that comes in because you have a tourist who will come for adventure, who will come for sea. You organize some innovative tour. I was speaking to somebody on the weekend and they were talking about Total Watching and they were saying the road to that is very bad, the road to the beach or to the world. I said, well, Prime Minister, fix the road. I said, no, what you can do, you can organize a hike. So you have a hike from the bad road to see the animals on the sea. So you have two bites of the same cherry. So you have a hike and then doing a hike, you have local juice to be sold as a show. So you have to be innovative. What I want is to pull out the innovation of young people and not for us always tell them what to do. There's absolutely nothing wrong in working in a hotel. Nothing wrong. But what must happen is our young people must be able to use their creativity, use their intelligence to create that new economic space so that they can survive. PM, if you don't mind, can I add something to this? The point that the PM was making is important. And that is the concept of value addition. Loosely, what he's saying is a large part of every dollar that comes in goes back out. So the value addition is low in terms of what stays. But it is low because we are not adequately linked within St. Lucia, such that everything that is produced, a large part of it needs to be imported. And therefore, the leakage that the PM talks about means to get one dollar from whether it's your nail, as he was discussing. I need to import all of the Q-tax, whatever, has to go on your nail. So the addition is obviously going to be very low. So part of the solution to what you're observing is how do you integrate the tourism product across more products being done in St. Lucia? So the value addition remains higher. But equally, I want to add something to what the Prime Minister has said. A lot of it is definitional. We limit our minds almost certainly into thinking what tourism is. If you say what is the tourism product, everyone can say, well, it is simply about tourists coming enjoying the beach, the hotels, maybe a few tours. And that defines tourism. But why limit it to that? So when we talk about tourism, the first thing we should be thinking is, what's the definition? How can we expand that definition? And even I would argue, let us break that barrier of thinking as tourists as only physically entering a space. The world of today is a world where we have turned everything we know of physical boundaries into an unlimited boundary space. And I would want to challenge our young future leaders. Let's start thinking of a new definition of digital tourism. If you have a digital tourism product that you are talking about, then the whole world becomes your stage overnight, overnight. Yes, we want them to come to St. Lucia. But what if we can have them, whether it's augmented reality or otherwise, experience St. Lucia in a digital space? That's a very open area of expanding your tourism market. And it addresses the issue of seasonality. Because then you don't have the problem of tourism is only in the winter months overseas when people come into the warmth. But you also have a northern and southern hemisphere. When it is summer in the southern hemisphere, it's winter in the northern hemisphere. Why limit our tourists only to northern hemisphere? What about exploring the southern hemisphere? Then you get rid of your seasonality problem. All you need to do is to understand what type of tourism product will the southern hemisphere want? Is it the same as the northern hemisphere or is it different? If you can understand that, you can start now thinking of expanding your market, expanding your product. It's still tourism, but I've changed the definition of tourism. So that is where we need to be thinking. When we talk of innovation and creativity, let's not take what we know as granted. In fact, I would argue everything you think you know throw it in the waste bin. Think about something else, something different. That is how we innovate. Tourism can be humongous. But if we are starting to think of tourism as sunset and sea and hotel, and that's the beginning and end of tourism, of course it's going to shrink because everybody else that have sun shone and sea will be doing something to compete. Open the vistas, look at the concept of tourism. It's the sharing of something that is indigenous to you with somebody who doesn't have it. And that can be unlimited as long as you can open your mind to alternative products. So that's your challenge. Go start thinking about, when I say you, future entrepreneurs, start thinking about alternative definitions of tourism. And you'll see how quickly not only will the product widen but the value addition that the PM talked about will increase. Thank you Madam President and thank you Dr. Leo. And for the young people in here, I just want to explain that Q-Tex is a brand of nail polish and I only know this as another young person because my parents would have taught me this. So I'm just letting all of us know this. But I would like to conclude by thanking everyone for joining us here today for the 53rd press launch, for the press launch of the 53rd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank and special thank you to the Caribbean Development Bank for partnering with us today, the National Youth Council for also being a partner of the CDB and the Government of St. Lucia. To UETV, to the Government Information Service, Events Company for setting up this beautiful location for us. I would also like to thank the staff of the Protocol Division of the Ministry of External Affairs and to everyone who came and supported, who engaged. I think coming from this session, we know now that we need a lecture. We need that engagement because there seems to be a lot of interest, a lot of ideas to exchange. So I'm looking forward, I suppose, that could be a part of our activities for the year. And once again, everyone, thank you for coming to those in the media. Thank you for those joining us on Zoom and via the internet. Thank you very much. My staff from the OPM is insisting that I say thank you to them, thank you very much guys for everything that you do. Thank you and have a good day.