CDB knocks T&T’s project progress
...blames administration changes
(Trinidad Express) Acting vice-president of operations at the Caribbean Development Bank Therese Turner-Jones believes Trinidad and Tobago and the CDB’s “story” is not impressive, given that many specific projects were not completed despite the benefits they would bring. Turner-Jones on Wednesday attributed this large gap between identified projects and completed ones to administration changes.
“In the last country strategy, we identified over $430 million in projects and less than $10 million actualised. So, that is a concern because in the strategy we identified doing more on water and sanitation...there is a lot of room there and we are doing some technical assistance for your master plan for water resources in the country, but it hasn’t been outstanding in terms of what we have been able to do,” she said.
She was speaking during a panel discussion hosted by the Central Bank of T&T, “Building T&T’s Economic and Financial Resilience—The Role of Multilateral Financial Institutions”, at the Central Bank auditorium in Port of Spain.
Drawing from chief economist and general manager at the Department of Research of the Inter-American Development Bank Dr Eric Parrado Herrera’s comment on the impact of democracy, she said there was a need for deeper dialogue with citizens as opposed to only policymakers.
Turner-Jones said, “Parrado Herrera mentioned something just in passing about democracy and the way we interact with members of our government who are members of our institutions... that dialogue tends to focus on a relationship at a point in time and I think what we need to be doing is going deeper where the dialogue is extended to civil society and the beneficiaries so it is not just seen as being associated with a particular administration.”
She continued, “Trinidad’s story, I think, for me, is a good story for maybe how not to do a country strategy meaning it’s typically not aligned with an election cycle and what happens is if it doesn’t get done in an administration then it’s abandoned and we have seen this across the region.”
Turner-Jones said administrations dump projects which are considered to be fine because they may not align with their mandate or they do not see the benefits of it during their administration.