World Bank’s Regional VP Wraps Up Visit to Belize

The World Bank’s Regional Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean, Carlos Felipe Jaramillo, has wrapped up his visit to Belize. Jaramillo was in the country on an official four-day visit where he met with numerous government officials. The visit served as an opportunity for Jaramillo to learn more about Belize’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate challenges and its multidimensional development challenges. Jaramillo spoke to the government press office last week and explained that his trip was successful and resulted in meaningful conversation with the government. 

Carlos Felipe Jaramillo, World Bank Vice President for LAC: “We are deepening our relationship with the Government of Belize, with the country, supporting in a number of areas where we think we can be useful. Our goal is to help countries that want to eliminate poverty and improve their development. And we see… a country that is progressing, moving forward with a good government. So I’m here to try to support those efforts. So we’ve been making inroads in this partnership and right now we have engagement in health which arose out of the pandemic. We have now support in agriculture and yesterday I was able to visit these agricultural, these farmers, and then trying to see how we can help them more with better technology and more investments. We have engagement also in helping the government with their fiscal management and debt management. We have done a public expenditure review with special focus on areas of education and health where we hope that we can continue to be useful. And maybe very importantly is the blue economy and we have a project that we are designing that we hope will come to maturity early next year, which is about blue cities and how to help Belize continue to consolidate this blue economy that is so important for the country.”

Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment, Christopher Coye, explained that Jaramillo’s visit will strengthen Belize’s application for eligibility to join the International Development Association (IDA).

Christopher Coye, Minister of State, Ministry of Finance: “We’ve had our issues in terms of debt management, fiscal management in the past and it took a lot for us to bring us to where we are today. And as we have moved along in that trajectory we felt that it would be important for us to reengage with various IFIs, including the World Bank. The World Bank has been very open with us. We are very thankful for the relationship that is deepening between ourselves. As Felipe mentioned we did have the support in health agriculture last year and those are big deals. They really for us can make tangible differences, especially in the case of agriculture and the matching grants program that that loan speaks to will benefit many thousands of small farmers. Now what we’re looking at… not only the blue cities program but also the energy, battery energy storage. I think it’s no secret the challenges in the energy sector that Belize has, partly of our own doing in that we have grown far faster than was projected. And so we are meeting peak demands that are impacted by the supply or the constraints of supply that we have locally and from Mexico. So it’s important for us to move very quickly in terms of improving the energy available for our local demands. The battery energy storage project that we’re looking at should attract or should bring between 40 and 50 megawatts capacity. So that will certainly make a big difference for us in our energy needs and the World Bank certainly has put not only the potential financial capacity to bear on terms that involve engagement of climate finance, but also the technical expertise. And I think we welcome, especially the technical expertise that the World Bank has to offer.”

Coye further explained that the IDA is a World Bank group that provides development assistance to member states.