Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley is to visit France in a few days for talks with President Emmanuel Macron, a senior government minister has announced.
Foreign Affairs Minister Kerrie Symmonds, who made the announcement in Barbados’ Parliament during the debate on the 2023-24 Estimates, said that he will be accompanying her to Paris.
Symmonds said that President Emmanuel Macron has “urged” that he be allowed to form part of a cooperative agreement with Barbados, so that there can be a summit allowing him to use his global reach as a G7 leader to help the Caribbean island advance the Bridgetown Initiative.
The Bridgetown Initiative is a proposal to reform the world of development finance, particularly how rich countries help poor countries cope with and adapt to climate change.
Barbados sets out three key steps in the Bridgetown Initiative. The first involves changing some of the terms around how funding is loaned and repaid. The aim is to stop developing nations from spiraling into a debt crisis when their borrowing is forced up by successive disasters like floods, droughts, and storms.
“By no stretch of the imagination could we have envisaged that this type of relationship would have been fostered for this country ten years ago,” Symmonds told legislators.
Prime Minister Mia Mottley is the first female Prime Minister of Barbados. She is a beloved veteran politician, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Ernest Deighton Mottley, a real estate broker and the first mayor of Bridgetown. In her historic career thus far, she holds the record for the most dominant political victory in the country’s history, securing all thirty seats as leader of the Barbados Labour Party, in addition to winning 72.8 percent of the popular vote – the largest share ever won by a party in a general election. She has spent years championing environmental protection and spearheading food security and reforestation programs on her island home.
