THERE is an important contest taking place in the region that we should put on our radar: Tomorrow, Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) is scheduled to elect a new president. Three candidates are lobbying the governors from the 19 Caribbean borrowing member countries and nine non-borrowing members for their support.

Jamaican Mr Warren Smith held the post from 2011 to 2021, a period shaped by the difficult recovery from the international financial crisis of 2007. Since the end of his tenure the bank has been buffeted by a deep internal crisis that culminated in the abrupt resignation of the president, triggering the current contest.

One of the three candidates, Barbadian Mr Daniel Best, spent almost 15 years at CDB, the last seven, until 2022, as director of projects. He is currently the senior infrastructure and development advisor to the Barbados prime minister who nominated him as her candidate.

Another candidate is the CDB’s Vice-President for Finance Mr Gregory Hill, a Trinidadian former investment banker, also nominated by his country.

The third candidate is Bahamian Mrs Therese Turner-Jones, whom we know well from her stint in Jamaica as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) country representative from 2013 to 2016, and as general manager for the Caribbean from 2021 to 2022.

Mrs Turner-Jones joined International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1993, worked across the Caribbean, and headed IMF’s technical assistance centre in Barbados. She is currently acting vice-president of operations at CDB and is a self-described agent of transformational change.

The winner of tomorrow’s contest will have to convince the majority of governors that his or her strategy for CDB will rescue it from its recent malaise and restore its relevance to the region. This is a crossroads for the bank that has been criticised as being aligned with the much-maligned Washington Consensus needing more scale to make a difference, and for its painstakingly slow delivery.

There has long been mistrust in the Caribbean of the business model of international development financial institutions like World Bank and IDB. It is not unusual to hear Caribbean academics, politicians, and social workers rail against the Washington Consensus, claiming it is designed to retard our development and maintain the unequal distribution of global wealth and power.

Recently, criticisms of the development banks have come from developed countries which are tired of the endless calls for more funds while inequality continues to grow but the emerging economies do not. The pressure on the Washington institutions was evident in the recent election campaigns for the presidency of World Bank and IDB. In both cases the winning candidates had to adopt powerful calls for reform of the institutions to stop them from being exclusive clubs for the world’s social and academic elite.

This election offers CDB an opportunity to be a voice for transformational change. The new president must have the humility to admit the bank’s shortcomings, the know-how to design new initiatives that demonstrate learning from past missteps; but most importantly the president must have the vision to create new strategic partnerships, enter new markets, and deliver new, home-grown solutions to Caribbean countries.