Jamaica knows Therese Turner-Jones well, as she came to Jamaica in May 2013 as country representative directly from the International Monetary Fund.

She was recruited to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) by then Caribbean General Manager Gerard Johnson as “an opportunity for a new career in development banking” from the high-ranking position of deputy division chief, Western Hemisphere Department, just as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to get serious about giving Jamaica an IMF programme.

She literally started her career with the IDB as country representative in Jamaica with the signing of the new extended fund facility (EFF) on May 1, 2013, an important role as the IDB was the largest lender across the two IMF programmes of 2010 and 2013. In her first three years, her work included tax reform, budget support, the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH), the water sector, and the Crime Security and Justice Programme.

As detailed in my Jamaica Observer interview in 2016, she was appointed general manager of the Caribbean Department on April 16, 2016, the first Caribbean woman and only the second Caribbean person (after Johnson) to become general manager of the IDB’s Caribbean Country Department (covering Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, The Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago).

She not only continued to carry out the functions of country representative for Jamaica, but importantly, Turner-Jones was based in Jamaica rather than Washington.

Jamaica

Turner-Jones moved to the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department to work on small Caribbean states in January 1993. Her first mission was to St Lucia, but she was quickly moved to work on Jamaica’s last EFF in 1993, which ended in 1996, just as Jamaica’s financial crisis began.

She worked her way up in various positions, interacting with the IMF executive board, led missions to Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and several Eastern Caribbean countries, and headed the IMF’s technical assistance centre in Barbados for three years before returning to the Western Hemisphere Department, where, in addition to working on Barbados and Guyana, she also served as senior advisor to the executive director for Canada, Ireland, and the Caribbean.

Watching her as Caribbean head in Jamaica, Turner-Jones has shown a vision for how the IDB could support a Caribbean future across a number of different areas, emphasising leveraging their knowledge, location, and culture to create partnerships in areas such as the green transition and disaster risk reduction management, ideas relevant to all the 19 member countries of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).

The IDB was a key funder of the Jamaica venture capital programme (JVCP) of the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ), an alternative to development banking highly relevant to the CDB, which ultimately spawned the private sector Caribbean Alternative Investment Association at the end of 2019, launched at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel by DBJ Chairman Paul Scott.

As then president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), current Economic Programme Oversight Committee chair and JMMB CEO Keith Duncan noted, he had “collaborated well with Therese”, and believes she is committed to “inclusive Caribbean development”. He noted that “an important project was the PSOJ Access to Finance for SMEs which we received technical and financial support on”. In 2019, Turner-Jones had been very impressed with Duncan’s access to finance initiative, and it remains a model as potentially one of the most promising public-private initiatives, unfortunately overtaken by the pivot to the COVID-19 response.

She also pushed digitisation, bringing the former prime minister of Estonia to Jamaica. My 2020 article ‘IDB’s Therese Turner-Jones on why Estonia’s digitisation experience is relevant to Jamaica in the post-COVID-19 world’ started by noting that in 2019 Turner-Jones took six Caribbean ministers of information on a trip with her to visit the Baltic nation of Estonia to study what the future of a genuinely digital society could look like for our small Caribbean countries. If this had started earlier, it would have been hugely helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic and would still be a quick win for the Caribbean even now.

Another area of her focus as IDB regional head was crime and violence, particularly the amount of violence being perpetrated against women and children in the region. Jacqui Sharpe, former CEO of Scotiabank in Jamaica, who worked with her on some social initiatives notes, “Therese was always highly accessible as a leader. She supported private sector initiatives to improve how we do business, but always with a view to how our activity would help Jamaicans, and especially women and the poor.”

At the end of 2019, at its 50-year birthday celebration in its then new head office, the IDB was buzzing with attendance from all sectors of Jamaican society, reflecting their over 60 projects in Jamaica alone across all areas of social, environmental, and economic policy, including a powerful speech on the decades-long work of the IDB in Jamaica by Minister of Finance Dr Nigel Clarke.

At the end of her time at the IDB during COVID-19 in 2021, Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton publicly credited his ambitious health plans for hospital and health upgrading as having been largely funded through support from the IDB, and that Therese Turner-Jones, as country head, had provided extremely valuable leadership and support to him, our health ministry, and the Jamaican Government.

We will leave the last word to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who argued at the Women in Leadership 2021 virtual conference hosted by The University of the West Indies Arthur Lok Jack Global School for Business that “none of the five secretary generals of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation [and] six presidents of the Caribbean Development Bank have been women”, adding that “these terribly lopsided statistics scream inequity”. Neither have there been any Bahamian presidents of the CDB, of course.

Sir Arthur Lewis was first, from St Lucia; then William Demas (Trinidad); Neville Nichols (Barbados); Compton Bourne (Guyana); my old boss Dr Warren Smith (Jamaica); and Dr Gene Leon (St Lucia).

Keith Collister