IDB partnering on education sector enhancements

The education system in Barbados is in line for modernisation in its curriculum which will soon include climate change and sustainable agriculture as areas of study.
This was formalised in an agreement signed between the Barbados Government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on Monday.
IDB President Ilan Goldfajn made this disclosure while addressing the bank’s 11th annual consultation with the governors of the countries comprising its Caribbean country department and the President of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) in Port-of-Spain.
Agreements were also signed between the IDB and Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana.
“Today for Barbados, we’re signing an agreement to promote student-centred classrooms, better integrate children with special needs and include climate change and sustainable agriculture in the curriculum,” Goldfajn announced.
Though not giving details of how the plan will be rolled out and at what level, he added: “It will also support physical and digital upgrades for schools, including making buildings more resilient and EDGE (Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies) compliant”.
EDGE is an approach used to analyse an institution’s status on gender equality through using various areas.
Goldfajn said the region should be proud of the progress being made in several areas, as he pointed to areas of support from the IDB over the last year.
“You should be proud of what your countries have achieved and your success in key areas shows how we can tackle challenges together. But as you know better than anyone, we must do so much more, and we must do it more effectively. Our citizens are demanding it,” he said.
Acknowledging that the region’s challenges were not created overnight and could not be solved in a day, Goldfajn said the work done over the past year should help the region to “do even more”.
“Last year, the IDB Group approved almost US$1.2 billion for your countries. That’s more than double the previous year and almost four times pre-pandemic levels. Last year, we approved programmes for strengthening fiscal sustainability, boosting economic growth and investing in resilient infrastructure, among other things,” he said.
“We also supported the development of the blue economy, strengthened the social sector and promoted private sector development. We also backed a range of innovative projects, big and small, including to enable entrepreneurial ecosystems and to help provide housing to vulnerable groups such as women, youth, children, single-parent households and persons living with disabilities,” he said.
The new IDB president, who was on his first official visit to the Caribbean, said the Washington-based institution was placing an emphasis on social issues including poverty, inequality, health, education, food and insecurity.
“We must make it easier to invest in mitigation and adaptation. We need to think of innovative ways to prepare, adapt and react with agility to natural disasters,” said Godfajn, while indicating that climate was another area of focus.
He reported that since the last consultation, Caribbean countries have recovered much of the gross domestic product lost during the pandemic. In some countries and sectors, he added, conditions are back to pre-pandemic levels or even better.
“But in other cases, the region’s recovery remains uneven. The outlook is affected by overlapping crises that you are already familiar with – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, historic debt and record inflation, food and energy insecurity, and of course, the climate crisis,” he said.
He added: “We need to think regionally and globally about how to think outside the box and to help adapt to the old and new challenges, including how to rise to the challenge of more frequent and costly natural disasters.”
Godfajn noted that the region was facing a triple threat of rising social demand, slow growth and high debt.
“The impacts of climate shocks are compounded here by decades-old structural issues, and today, in the face of those challenges, citizens increasingly demand better services. But those demands are hard to meet because governments have limited resources due to high levels of debt and subpar growth in a world already impacted by climate change, which makes it harder to generate additional resources,” he explained.
“Governments must overcome the historic plagues of poverty and inequality, increasing productivity and accelerating growth – all while tackling more frequent climate events and scarce resources,” he said.
(MM)