Haiti officially became a member of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) on January 19, 2007 and participated for the first time as a member at the Two Hundred and Twenty-Sixth meeting of CDB’s Board of Directors (BOD) held on May 28, 2007. However, preparations for CDB’s programme of development assistance to Haiti actually started in July 2004 when CDB participated in the High Level Donors’ Conference on Haiti in Washington DC and endorsed the priorities identified in the Interim Cooperation Framework (ICF), especially its emphasis on strengthening political and economic governance, its focus on the various factors pivotal to economic recovery, and its attention to the acute challenge of improving access to basic services.