Good morning.

It is my honour to welcome you to The Bahamas, and to open this 56th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. To every Governor, every Minister, and every partner who travelled here to be with us, welcome. You have come to a nation that sees this Bank as one of our own. It was built by our region. It answers to our region. It carries the purpose of our region.

We have called this gathering “Forging the Caribbean’s Future.” It is a strong theme. But we should be honest from the start, because honesty is the only foundation that holds.

You cannot forge a future with borrowed fire.

So let me begin with honesty. With the world as it is, and not the world we want.

The world as it is has grown smaller for us, not larger. Capital that once moved freely now hesitates at our shores. Our banks lose correspondent relationships, and our businesses are cut away from a financial system the rest of the world takes for granted. We are told, often at the same time, that we are too small to matter and too prosperous to be helped. A single storm can erase a year of our national income in one night. That same storm can disqualify us from the financing we need to recover, because a formula written in a distant capital has decided that we have graduated.

Let me say in the sincerest terms. We do not feel like graduates when the waters are rising.

Climate finance, when it arrives, comes late. And too often, it comes as debt. So, we rebuild. We borrow to rebuild. And the debt we carry crowds out the schools, the clinics, and the opportunities we owe our own people.

This is the world as it is. You know it. I am here to name it honestly, because no lasting progress is built on a borrowed truth.

We also have to be honest about ourselves.

For too long, we have treated endurance like achievement. We have survived hurricanes and pandemics, debt and downturns, and we have called that strength. It is strength. But this morning I must say the harder thing.

We have been resilient for so long that we have begun to mistake survival for progress.

Surviving the storm is different from changing the conditions that create it. Enduring the old order is different from building a better one. A region that learns only to survive will be asked to survive again, and again, and again, until survival is the only thing it knows how to do.

And I say “we” without exception, because The Bahamas lives with this same reality. We, too, have lived as tenants in a house we did not build, following rules drafted in rooms where we had no seat. I am here as a leader who believes the time to build has arrived.

That is the truth at the centre of our gathering. The global financial architecture was not designed for us. It was designed without our storms, our scale, and our future in mind. We have rented it across generations. The rent keeps rising. The rules keep changing without our consent. And no outside power is coming to fix it for us.

So we are left with one clear question. I ask every Governor in this hall to consider it.

If we will not write the rules of our own financial future, then we will be left only to discover how to survive within the rules of others.

Those who refuse to write the rules will, in the end, be written by them. 

There is no easier path where we simply wait for the house to repair itself.

We are not the first to face this choice. I want to tell a story because it may be the most important thing I say to you this morning.

Africa faced this same choice. African nations were told what we are told. Too great a risk. Too fragmented. Too small to be financed at scale. And Africa made a choice.

Africa did not knock louder. Africa built its own door.

They founded the African Export-Import Bank, Afreximbank, an institution to finance African trade on African terms. They did not wait for permission. They began the work themselves.

Look at what that institution can do now. This year, Afreximbank raised its commitment to our region from three billion United States dollars to five. More than seven hundred and fifty million has already reached the Caribbean. A pipeline of more than two billion is still to follow. They are building a trade centre in Bridgetown. And they have turned their attention to something that should get the attention of everyone in this room. The creation of a Caribbean Export-Import Bank. A Caribbean Eximbank. An institution that could finally be our own.

We should be clear about what this means. It was not charity passing down from north to south. It was solidarity rising from south to south. It was one part of the global majority saying to another. We have built our own house. Now we will help you build yours.

Africa did not wait. The only question that remains this morning is whether we will.

And I know what gives some of us pause. It is not the cost of building. It is a quieter doubt. The doubt that we can act together at all.

There are some, even in this room, who feel the pull of a familiar temptation. To place one nation first. To pursue the national interest alone, and to leave the regional interest to fend for itself. I understand that temptation. Every leader here answers first to their own people. That is not a weakness. It is the duty of office.

There is an African proverb that speaks directly to this moment. If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

The Caribbean has never needed speed. The Caribbean has always needed distance. And no single one of our economies, no matter how determined, can travel that distance on its own.

So we must not allow ourselves to be turned against one another, competing for the same scarce capital, the same investor, the same narrow advantage, while the architecture that disadvantages every one of us is left untouched. When we are set against each other, we never win.

And we must not tear down the institutions we have only begun to build for ourselves. CARICOM is the first house we built together. It is not finished. It is not perfect. No union of free nations is ever perfect. But you do not abandon the house you are building because the work grows hard, or because a door begins to stick. You stay. And you finish it.

Where our union is weak, we should strengthen it. Where it is broken, we should repair it. Where it has fallen short, we should not walk away. We should ask the harder question of how to make it work.

Whether we choose to act together or apart, one truth will not bend to our preference. The same tide that lifts one of our islands lifts them all. The same storm that floods one of our shores threatens every other. We may sail under different flags. But we are passengers in the same vessel. No one bails water from one end of a sinking boat and claims he is safe.

Some will say that this kind of ambition is wrong for uncertain times. I believe the opposite. Uncertainty is the reason to build. A sailor does not wait for calm water to learn his craft. He learns because the sea will never be still.

So let me be practical, because a vision without a plan is only an idea.

We must pool the strength we already have. No single Caribbean economy can finance its future alone. Together, we are a market the world has every reason to take seriously. It is no longer enough to be a region the world is willing to invest in. We must become a region willing to invest in itself.

We must no longer accept that a credit rating built for a continent should decide the fate of an archipelago. We must create tools of our own. Regional guarantees. Blended finance. Mechanisms that reward our resilience instead of punishing our geography. We should be measured by the future we are willing to finance, not by the disasters we are forced to survive.

We must use the institutions we already have, beginning with this one. The Strategic Plan of this Bank, for the years 2026 to 2035, gives us a foundation. We should build on it, not around it.

And we must invest in the one asset that no agency can ever downgrade, and that no storm can ever wash away. The mind of a Caribbean child.

We owe our young people far more than survival. We owe them prosperity. And we owe them something even more powerful. A reason to stay.

Today, too many of our brightest leave these shores and do not return, because the future they want is being built somewhere else. Every gifted mind that leaves tells us something about the future we have offered them. We must change that verdict.

We owe our children more than a region to inherit. We owe them a region worth staying for.

We should give them an education that teaches more than endurance. It must teach them to be curious, to question, to imagine, and to compete with any mind, in any place, in a world that changes faster than any curriculum can follow. A region that values curiosity is a region that can never be left behind.

The future will not belong to those who simply endured it. It will belong to those who dared to build it.

So let me be clear about where we now stand.

This is not a storm to be waited out. It is a tide that has already turned.

We do not seek a finer room in another’s house. We are laying a foundation of our own. 

We do not ask for a seat at a table that others have set. We are building the table.

And we are no longer the small, the vulnerable, the high risk on another’s ledger. We are the place where the Caribbean comes to forge its future. That is the name written on the door of this gathering. It should become the name on the door of the house we build.

So what does this ask of us? It asks us to accept that resilience is no longer enough. Surviving a shock is not the same as shaping a future. A region that only endures will remain poorer, more fragile, and more dependent than it needs to be.

And what must we now do? We must build. We must deepen our partnership with Afreximbank. We must move from speaking of a Caribbean Eximbank to bringing one to life. We must give this Bank’s plan our political will, not polite applause. And we must finance the ambition of our children with the same seriousness we give our debt.

We cannot build the future of the Caribbean on the old order. That order is passing, and nostalgia for it is no strategy at all.

This must be the era of possibility. But possibility is not a feeling we talk into existence. It is an institution we build. With a balance sheet. With a building. And with a name.

We have been tenants long enough.

We are no longer asking for the keys to a house we did not build. We are laying the foundation of one that we will.

History should not remember us as the generation that survived the old world. It should remember us as the generation that built the new one.

To every nation of this region ready to do the work, I say this morning: The Bahamas will build it with you.

Thank you. Together, let’s forge this future. With our own fire. And in our own hands