Barbados has not adequately utilised the $484 million it borrowed from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in the last four years.
The bank’s Office of Evaluation and Oversight has produced a programme evaluation report on Barbados for the period 2010 to 2013, which has concluded that its portfolio here “has been persistently characterised by slow execution, delaying or preventing the achievement of results”
As a result, the IDB has made several recommendations it said were part of a plan “to work with the Government of Barbados to find ways to improve project execution”.
It includes the full implementation of an action plan that will be “adhering to a timeline for implementation and a results framework for monitoring and evaluation”.
The organisation also wants to work with Government to “establish criteria to gauge the complexity of project design”, “invest in further analysis of constraints to procurement and identify ways to address them”, “continue to offer assistance to strengthen the Solicitor General’s Chambers”, and “explore with the government the feasibility of establishing a central fiduciary unit to manage multiple projects”.
This was in addition to strengthening the relevance and development effectiveness of the bank’s programme in Barbados “through a greater engagement with the private sector –in particular, making better use of [Multilateral Investment Fund operations].
The IDB said its Barbados “financial envelope” for December 2009 to October 2013 period was an estimated $400 million, but revealed that “actual approvals of sovereign-guaranteed loans during the strategy period totaled [$484 million, reflecting a threefold increase over the previous strategy period”.
These funds were to have been channeled into “four key areas that were highly relevant and directly linked to the country’s development strategy” – coastal infrastructure and climate change adaptation, water and sanitation, energy, and education.
But while the IDB appeared to be relatively happy with how projects related to the energy sector were unfolding, it reported “limited results” in the other areas, concluding that “in general, the operations under review have not yet executed sufficiently to produce tangible outcomes, making it difficult to assess the achievement of the current [country strategy].”
“While the country office and the government have taken several measures to address this situation, disbursements have remained sluggish. For instance, on average a project in Barbados takes almost four times as long as projects in the rest of the bank to disburse 25 per cent of the total loan amount approved.
“Only two investment loans were completed during the period. Of the ten loans that remained active, nine have yet to achieve the 25 per cent disbursement level, and only one has reached 50 per cent”.
The IDB acknowledged it had to share some of the blame, noting that on its side “unsatisfactory project performance was due to poor project design (overly complex components, unrealistic deadlines, complicated procurements) and to excessive requirements for information, documentation, and approvals/no objections”.
