Hurricane Melissa is a good entry point into the story of Jamaica. Uh just to give you some context, it's the third most powerful hurricane ever recorded. If you were to look at the outsized impact it had, Hurricane Katrina when it hit the US accounted for probably 1% of US GDP. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan probably accounted for maybe less than 5% of Japan's economy. Hurricane Melissa, on the other hand, accounted for 57% of Jamaica's GDP. It's a a massive impact of devastation. So, you would consider it in in this way. It it wiped out the wealth of households. It destroyed the productive capabilities of the areas that were impacted and it destroyed our infrastructure. We really were badly hit by this natural disaster. But that's not the full story of Jamaica and infrastructure. Most of our infrastructure was laid built in the colonial era and we were not investing and maintaining in a routine way to ensure that the infrastructure could withstand disasters. So for example, drains and gullies uh and waterways that were built 100 years ago, 70 years ago, certainly could not withstand the climate events that we have now. So whilst Hurricane Melissa has drawn attention to Jamaica, uh the truth is that Jamaica was wrestling with an infrastructure problem and my administration had actually started this process of treating with the infrastructure remake of Jamaica, the transformation of Jamaica through new infrastructure. The other challenge with infrastructure in Jamaica is that when Jamaica was being thought of laid out its towns and cities, you know, climate change was not a thing. And so the spatial structure of Jamaica where towns are located, where schools are located, where hospitals are located. If you visited Jamaica, you would notice that our road network skirts the coast and inland it skirts rivers. If we were to build Jamaica today, we would not do it like that. We would be far more sensitive to where we spatially locate critical infrastructure. So, Hurricane Melissa, we see it as an opportunity to introduce urgency in the transformation and renewal of Jamaica. So for for my administration, we want to be able to improve the efficiency, speed and scale of public administration to deliver infrastructure development. This conference clearly would be about uh how do we finance infrastructure? Uh I I think we all know I think we have the answers. I think the real issue is how fast can we do it with the certainty that when you make the commitment to invest uh the investment will actually come to fruition. Another part of the Jamaican story which uh I I like to put it in this way. Jamaica was referred to uh in many instances as the basket case of financial mismanagement. uh and now today we are referred to as the case study for fiscal discipline and good economic management. So that is a story of transformation that uh needs to be told over and over and over again. That story of fiscal transformation could be put in this way. uh we reduced our debt to GDP from possibly close to 150% of GDP to um the last time we were at about uh 70% debt to GDP and we did that within a decade. Uh today Jamaica is the only country in the region that does not have uh foreign exchange controls. Uh we have a freely floating currency. Even after a disaster uh our ratings were maintained and one rating agency upgraded us and we were able to carry nine budgets without any new form of taxation. So that investment in fiscal discipline paid off because built into that fiscal discipline was a disaster riskmanagement framework which allowed us to have access to just about $600 million US in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. That helped us to restore electricity. We had uh funds that we could uh make available to our public utility to rapidly restore our national grid uh which was decimated after the hurricane. Only 23% of Jamaica had electricity. 3 months later we were up to somewhere in the region of about 90% of the country restored. Uh and that's rapid. that allowed us to immediately deploy capital to open roads, repair roads, schools, hospitals and to get the economy back again. But that also gave confidence to our international partners. Uh and we were able to garner a financing package from uh almost all the multilaterals uh to support a much bigger program of reconstruction of infrastructure. I think the main asset of Jamaica aside from its people and our creativity and the brand that it has created in terms of international awareness of the country and who we are as a people and what we stand for would be our geography. Um our geography gives us particular advantage. uh close to the United States, smack in the middle of the Caribbean, close to major trade routes, good ports, we have the seventh largest natural harbor. Um we have mineral resources, we have good institutions. Uh if it is one thing that you can say about Jamaica, Jamaica is strong with institutions. But that alone cannot guarantee growth and prosperity. Jamaica needs infrastructure that can deliver on its ambition. Jamaica started out with good infrastructure. Poor economic management did not allow governments to continue to invest in that infrastructure. So we faced about 50 years of disinvestment in our infrastructure. Now, we are at a point where Jamaica could decide to incrementally renew its infrastructure or we could be ambitious and take on a massive transformation of Jamaica. Massive transformation at scale. Roads, ports and airports, logistics operations, schools, healthc care facilities, tourism, housing, energy, water. We could look to do all of this at scale and at pace, which is the ambition of the government. Uh the the challenge to that would be obviously how do you finance this without toppling the fiscal discipline that you have invested in. I I look at it from a different perspective. I think it is because we have shown we are fiscally disciplined why we would be able to attract financing. It is because we have been fiscally disciplined in managing our affairs. we can guarantee a stream of income uh that we could then partner with the private sector through PPP and various other arrangements to have infrastructure built. The big question is going to be can the public administration do this at scale and speed. the permitting, the approvals, um the management and supervision, the contractors themselves, those are going to be the issues and that is what the government will be addressing in the months to come. And that is why we have established a new entity called the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority that will managed some of these large projects uh in uh a a parallel system that will be more uh private sector uh in terms of its approvals and permittings and management procurement and contracting systems. If I were an investor outside of Jamaica looking to invest in Jamaica, uh I I would certainly want to know that there is political stability. Policies are not going to change um willy-nilly. Politics won't interfere with economic objectives. And I think being the prime minister of Jamaica and having been there now for 10 years, uh I think I can say definitively that the economic course of Jamaica uh is not likely to change with a change of government and that is because uh we got here through a social partnership and that social partnership is strong. So the political risk in investment in Jamaica would be very limited uh if non-existent. The other issue about the stance of the public bureaucracy is it supportive or is it just invested in a process and not necessarily an outcome. That is where my administration will be making the next big change. Uh we see efficiency and productivity as a renewable resource and we have to start to cultivate it. So you see this efficiency the in the ease of doing business and uh we recognize that we need to do much more work to ensure that our environment is seen uh from investors coming in as a businessfriendly environment uh an environment that respects time because that is money and get things done. That's the culture that we want to infuse in our public bureaucracy because that is important when you are going to invest in our water sector for example and you have contracts and deals and financing lined up and the response from government takes so long that your investors say what's happening is it going to happen and then they leave and go to uh other opportunities. is so we recognize that that we have to move quickly, we have to make decisions quickly and we have to create an environment that is supportive and facilitating of business. So water that's a a big area for us uh necessary for resilience building necessary for supporting economic growth. Uh we have uh dams, we have a pumped hydro storage project uh and many other water projects that might be of interest to investors. Energy. Jamaica has one of the highest energy costs in the region. Uh and we are now looking to uh reduce that by changing our generation capacity uh to more efficient uh generation options including renewables. We have u a procurement now for approximately 300 megawatts of solar with battery included. So that's a a big opportunity and there are other opportunities including um as I said pumped hydro storage and um uh natural gas uh fired plants. Then tourism uh tourism is always a big draw for investment in Jamaica and we we're welcoming of more tourism investments and we already have a very strong ecosystem to support tourism uh ports and airports, logistics, transportation in general. Uh we're looking to develop a new port in Jamaica. uh housing and urban development. Uh we have a deficit of about 150,000 housing solutions. Uh and we would welcome uh investor interest particularly in the affordable and lowincome end of the housing market. Uh I think that uh there is a a lucrative business opportunity there for housing uh in healthcare in education. Jamaica also has uh significant mineral resources. Uh we welcome investments in the mining sector. Uh whether it is boxite, rare earths, um traditional gold, silver, um and uh limestone. So there are significant opportunities for investment in Jamaica. I mean that's just a few of them that I've listed. I could have said film. [laughter] Yeah, we're starting our film industry now. We've had a a few movies being shot in Jamaica over the last couple of of of years and that's that's an area in which there could be massive uh investments and returns. The hope is that NAR, the National Reconstructional Resilience Authority will create a demonstration effect to the conventional uh public bureaucracy. Uh what we have done through NAR is to look at all the business processes of government and try to reduce the number of steps to re-engineer how government works. uh because often times the regulations, the legislation and the policy create steps which are not necessarily relevant to the current objectives, but because they are on the books, you have to go to parliament to change them. There's a political process, they remain. Public servants, their role is to perfect the rules. they're not necessarily vested in the outcomes. Uh and to change that you go through a political cycle. What we have done is to establish with NAR uh a new set of rules not to abandon accountability and oversight but to make accountability and oversight more efficient and related to outcomes. NAR set up to do just that. So for example uh projects that go through NAR don't go through our public investment process. Uh there's a a different process which is accelerated still looks at risks and so forth but it it doesn't uh go through some of the steps which may be irrelevant considering uh the emergency of the projects that it will deal with. uh we are putting in place a new procurement system for NAR which will be far still preserves um competitiveness and transparency but it gets you quicker to the contracting process and quicker to the execution of the project. So those are two ways in which we have uh changed the way in which the public bureaucracy works to convert the investment capital into actual projects. We tend to look at hurricane and natural disasters, the devastation that they cause as the destruction of a building and rubble that it creates. But if you were to look at it as a wiping out of the wealth of the household, many of whom are not able to recover that wealth. They can't rebuild their house. the entire wealth of that household would be the house and they're not able to rebuild it. So these natural disasters are not neutral. They're actually regressive. So they they make the population poorer. So the intervention of NAR and what we're trying to do at the end of the day building new infrastructure is great but we need to restore household wealth otherwise poverty uh will rise. So whatever we do in infrastructure, it is also a strategy for treating with poverty. So infrastructure must directly restore houses that were destroyed uh but not in the place where they were destroyed if that place is not safe. So there is a relocation component. It must provide employment because the the most sustainable way of restoring household wealth is by the generation of income from employment. So uh we will be looking at our infrastructure projects to see how much employment they generate and to support projects that are generating employment. Uh and thirdly it's the restoration of economic activity. Uh infrastructure by itself will create economic activity no doubt. But infrastructure that is planned that is synchronized that is connected andworked especially into clusters that gives you even greater economic benefit. So we're not just looking to rebuild in a haphazard way. We're looking to create infrastructure that when put together uh creates an economic cluster. So the infrastructure that connects special economic zone to a port next to an airport next to an urban center in proximity of uh facilities for people to live where you can get a good pool of labor. That's the kind of thinking that we're putting in infrastructure development of Jamaica. Jamaica is welcoming of your investment. Uh Jamaica is safe for you to invest and Jamaica will yield great returns. Uh, Jamaica will become the Singapore of the Caribbean.