Barbados is in line to benefit from up to US$100 million a year in funding from IDB Invest.
James Scriven, chief executive officer of the entity, which is the private sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, said his institution saw several opportunities to help Barbados, including in the improvement of its physical infrastructure.
This includes enhancing ports of entry, improving access to water and sanitation and expanding housing opportunities.
He was speaking in an interview on Wednesday at Wyndham Grand Barbados Sam Lord’s Castle where IDB Invest held its three-day Sustainability Week 2026 event .
“We’ve been growing significantly in Barbados. Historically, we maybe were doing US$4 to US$10 million a year, last year we did US$80 million. This year we plan to do something similar,” he said.
“So, in general, we’re growing to the likes of between US$80 and US$100 million a year, and . . . historically that is a record high.”
Deep conversations
Scriven saw major opportunities to help Barbados fortify its physical infrastructure.
“We know that there are conversations about the airport. We know we’re in conversations about expansions of ports, separating the container ports [from] the cruise ships, for example,” Scriven shared.
“We’re in deep conversations about water and sanitation, those are areas that are extremely important to the island. We’re in deep conversations about housing, as another example. These are some areas that we are in exploration, . . .and we recently signed a few deals in the financial sector.” Barbados for the first time hosted Sustainability Week this year.
“We felt that the Caribbean was the right place . . . for a number of reasons. We’re moving away from small fragmented islands to a land of opportunities and we felt bringing in investors to understand better the market was a big objective,” he explained.
“So in a sense creating size [and] regional integration but more importantly the level of innovation that is actually happening today in the Caribbean, we felt it was a place to be able to do it.”
Inequality
Scriven said Sustainability Week being here also signified “how important Barbados has been”.
“So this is not only about the Caribbean but even more importantly about Barbados. Your Prime Minister has become a big voice, a voice of many areas of inequality but more importantly, she coined the word climate crisis and we did feel that the Caribbean is disproportionately affected by the effects of climate and we did feel that a big event . . . to understand the effect of climate is an important one,” he noted.
“You sit in front on the beach, everybody was expecting a beautiful beach, but they see Sargassum, that’s an [effect on] climate and that is affecting Barbados and across the Caribbean.”
Scriven said IDB Invest felt it was important to bring more than 800 people to the island, with others participating online, to “see the effects of climate and the potential of the Caribbean”.
“We felt it had to be in the Caribbean and we felt that Barbados was the right place for that,” he added. ( SC)
