CARICOM member states examining Regional Strategic Plan- Fourth High Level Forum on Donor Coordination begins

The Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Fourth High Level Forum on Donor Coordination convened this morning at the Guyana Marriott Hotel, focusing on six priority areas inclusive of Social, Economic and Technological Resilience of the Region.

The main thrust of the two-day event is to foster greater integration among regional agencies, international partners and member states.

Chairperson of the forum and CARICOM’s Deputy Secretary General, Manorma Soeknandan said a collaborative effort is needed by all the aforementioned, to ensure that the Community succeeds holistically.

“You have your own strategic plans with or without the input from your partners, how do you deal with constant change of rules and regulations?…and you also have common challenges, issues about communication, information sharing, visibility, branding issues, all of that empahsizes  the need for us to equally participate in this forum, so that we might come up with some workable results to tackle the challenges,” she highlighted.

In his opening remarks, Secretary General, Ambassador Irwin LaRocque while lauding the Strategic Plan, titled “Repositioning CARICOM,” as a well thought out document , which was approved by all the CARICOM Heads of Government.

“Its overriding strategic objective is to build or enhance the resilience of the member states to withstand the social, economic and environmental challenges and to put us on the trajectory of development, this plan was drawn up after extensive consultations,” the Secretary General posited.

He assured that the implementation of this strategic plan will be continuously assessed in order to monitor and evaluate the progress of the regional integration process.

Over the next two days representatives and other officials will deliberate on presentations such as, “Improving Programme Implementation and Enhancing Systems to Deliver Development Results” and “Enhancing Governance in the Caribbean Community,” among a plethora of other issues facing the Caribbean.