Wade: Belize’s Ability to Creatively Restructure Debt Signals Maturity for Foreign Investment

Wade suggests that the fact that Belize was able to reach this level of sophistication in restructuring our debt sends a positive signal to foreign investors that we are ready to conduct business in this new way.

Beverly Wade

Beverly Wade, Director, Blue Bond & Project for Finance Permanence, O.P.M.

“It then allows us to now send the signal to say we’re honestly ready to leverage what we’ve done with the blue bonds and to now attract new potential investors. And I’ll give you an example of a tangible that has related from the blue bonds. Since we’ve signed on to the blue bonds, the Government of Belize is now working along with some other international donors. In particular, the W.W.F., T.N. C. is a part of it also and Q Foundation. It’s a consortium of international NGOs that are now looking at designing for Belize what is referred to as Project for Finance Permanence. It’s basically looking at a blended approach through financing – coastal and marine conservation, sustainable use and best practices. It is looking at creating a nexus between government inflows, philanthropic inflows, private sector inflows and actually looking at the creation of a regime that would now allow capitalization of a fund at the end of the day that would then be looked at as providing certain levels of finance permanence.”