PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) – Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley joined regional leaders in Bridgetown, Barbados for a meeting with a bipartisan United States Congressional delegation on Saturday.

The meeting focused on several issues including security, economic and climate goals for the US and CARICOM.

The Bridgetown Initiative is a call for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture (IFA) that was designed at a time when most of the current member states were not independent and when climate risks or social inequalities, including gender equality, were not considered pre-eminent development challenges.

The small island developing states (SIDS), including those in the Caribbean have become increasingly at odds with the reality and needs of the world today, making the IFA entirely unfit for purpose in a world characterized by unrelenting climate change, increasing systemic risks, extreme inequality, highly integrated financial markets vulnerable to cross-border contagion, and dramatic demographics, technological, economic, and geopolitical changes.

The Bridgetown Initiative is named for the capital city of Barbados, where the initiative originates. While Barbados continues to play a leading role, it is not an initiative of Barbados alone, but rather a coalition of partners in a movement for global change.

Rowley told reporters that this approach was led by the Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leader with lead responsibility for that.

‘I have been involved with it, being to Washington on more than one occasion. The US delegation has been to the Caribbean. We thought we had made some progress, but it has been crystalising on something called the Bridgetown Initiative which we need to defend and grow and advance the US authorities and the international financial bodies,” Rowley said.

The delegation was led by US Democratic Leader in the House of Representatives Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and included Representative Maxine Waters, Ranking Member, Committee on Financial Services, Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Ranking Member, Foreign Affairs Committee; Member, Committee on Financial Services and Republican Amata Coleman Radewagen Vice-Chairman, Committee on Veterans’ Affairs; Member, Natural Resources Committee; Member, Foreign Affairs Committee.

Last year Jeffries led a Congressional delegation visit to Trinidad and Tobago, where he joined US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the 45th Regular Meeting of the CARICOM Heads of Government Conference.