Barbados prime minister leads push to transform global finance

Having emerged in recent years as a leading voice in the developing world’s push for climate finance, Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, renewed her calls for reform of the global development finance system ahead of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) annual spring meetings.

In the lead-up to the week-long gathering in Washington DC, which opened on Monday 10 April, Mottley and Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote that international financial institutions have “not yet done enough” to support poor countries that face multiple converging crises, including climate disasters, poverty and increasing hunger. “When humanity is facing some of the gravest crises in history, an inadequate response has left countries and people feeling increasingly alone,” they said.

The meeting’s agendas, they added, “offer little reason for optimism” to believe help will come for lower-income countries that are swamped by debt and unable to deal with the climate crisis. Among them are many in Mottley’s own region, the Caribbean, where island nations are highly vulnerable to extreme weather, while debt levels average 90 percent of GDP.

Mottley took office in 2018 with more than 70 percent of the vote, becoming the first woman to hold the position since Barbados gained independence from Britain in 1966. Long active in the country’s politics, she has campaigned against pollution, climate change and deforestation, and turned Barbados into “a frontrunner in the global environmental movement”, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

The Barbadian leader has garnered increasing international attention since she delivered a lauded speech at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November 2022. At the opening ceremony, she called on developed countries to unlock funding for climate-vulnerable countries. “There is no way that developing countries can fight this battle without access to concessional funding,” she said.