Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at, Guyana–A Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) Debt Ad­vo­ca­cy Team is to be ap­point­ed to cam­paign for debt re­lief and/or debt ame­lio­ra­tion on be­half of high­ly-in­debt­ed mem­ber states.This was one of the key out­comes of the re­cent­ly-con­clud­ed 35th Con­fer­ence of the Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment An­tigua and Bar­bu­da.Cari­com chair­man Gas­ton Browne, Prime Min­is­ter of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, said the team would ad­vo­cate with de­vel­op­ment part­ners on be­half of mem­ber states.The ini­tia­tive emerged out of the recog­ni­tion that the cur­rent bur­den­some debt is not re­al­is­tic for some mem­ber states, giv­en their struc­tur­al and oth­er eco­nom­ic vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, Prime Min­is­ter Browne said.

Debt ad­vo­ca­cy was one of the ar­eas the Com­mis­sion on the Econ­o­my ze­roed in on as part of the mea­sures to be tak­en to re­spond to the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges fac­ing the re­gion.A re­gion­al debt man­age­ment mech­a­nism is to be de­signed and a re­gion­al fis­cal sus­tain­abil­i­ty frame­work for­mu­lat­ed with­in six months, the new­ly-elect­ed Prime Min­is­ter of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da said.

An­oth­er strat­e­gy pro­posed by the Com­mis­sion on the Econ­o­my which the Heads of Gov­ern­ment have sanc­tioned is re­source mo­bil­i­sa­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly from non-tra­di­tion­al sources of fi­nanc­ing.They have al­so agreed to pur­sue the pro­mo­tion of pub­lic pri­vate part­ner­ships for de­vel­op­ment of eco­nom­ic in­fra­struc­ture with tech­ni­cal ad­vice from the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB), the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB) and the World Bank.