“The bank is one of the biggest financiers of development projects in Saint Lucia and Saint Lucia is one of our biggest clients, probably the top five clients when you look at all of our members. We play a very critical role in financing the development of many aspects of the lives of people in Saint Lucia. So this mission was meant to do an analysis, have conversations, do consultations about the performance of those projects especially the implementation performance to not only understand where the bottlenecks and challenges are but to try to jointly co-create and come up with solutions to those challenges.”
The four-day review convened key stakeholders, including Permanent Secretaries, Project Implementation Staff, and Senior Public Officers, for in-depth discussions, project presentations, and site visits to ongoing initiatives. Gail Richardson, World Bank Operations Manager for the Caribbean, based in Kingston, Jamaica, emphasized the importance of these conversations in addressing challenges and improving project outcomes.
“Because we realize that we’re putting the same procurement procedures on the shoulders of countries whether they’re small or large. So we did have a very interesting exercise in Saint Lucia which was to simplify the procurement documents for national competitive bidding. That’s now with the government for review. But it’s those kinds of steps that I think we can take to be able to streamline how we work. We have to realize this is a small island context and we have to be able to adjust how we do business.”
“We realize we are in the same boat as agencies. We are not competitors, we are partners and there are benefits with us working together, understanding each other’s challenges and working together to come up with solutions.”
Prime Minister Hon. Philip J. Pierre engaged in a high-level dialogue with the World Bank and CDB, emphasizing the need to streamline processes for more efficient project execution and timely benefits for the people of Saint Lucia. Director of Finance, Imran Williams, underscored the government’s substantial financial commitment to achieving the projects’ development objectives.
“As a result of putting in so much money, it’s only fair that the persons entrusted with the responsibility of rolling out those projects are held accountable and that they’re given the audience to present on the performance to date. As well as to highlight some of the issues, they might be encountering. So that the senior officials within the government as well as the senior officials from the donor-funded agencies, which are the World Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank, can come together to find proper solutions that have cross cutting issues.”
Several key issues were identified to enhance project outcomes, including stronger collaboration between executing ministries, improved institutional frameworks for efficient project management, and increased training and capacity building for implementation staff. Discussions also focused on addressing challenges related to contract and consultant performance, supply chain disruptions, cost escalation, and the availability of skilled labor.