KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Aug 19, CMC – Prime Minister Dr. Godwin Friday says that he has received an assurance from Taiwan of a two million US dollar grant towards the establishment of a national development bank in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
“There are other things that we discussed, of course. We have our plan to proceed with the national development bank, so naturally we discussed this,” Prime Minister Friday told reporters as he brief the country on his recent visit to Taipei.
“We had started that discussion before we left for Taiwan, so the ground was already prepared. So when we arrived and we spoke with the technical officer, DG, Director General Ham, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lin, they were already aware of our interest in developing the national development bank, and they are willing, very much so, to assist us in the establishment because they see the possibility,” Prime Minister Friday said.
He said that taking into account those concerns that were raised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “we have approached our friends, our partners, and they have, again, been very forthright and willing to assist.
“We can say there’s a commitment of at least two million US dollars as a grant to help to capitalise the bank with other funding available on soft terms,” Friday said, adding that while he is “less excited” about the soft loans “but we have to balance the benefit of that with the advantage or the good that it will do in the economy and to see whether it makes sense to borrow three or 3.5 per cent and then lend on..
“These are things that we are studying here with our team and we’ll decide how we go on. But the Development Bank is very much a goal. We are now in the process of putting together the legislation,” he said, noting that public discussions have taken place on the initiative.
“ So this has been very much an active process of trying to do this right,” Friday said, telling reporters that the bank is intended to address a long-standing bottleneck in access to capital, particularly for ordinary Vincentians and small enterprises that have been “locked out of the system”.
However, he insisted that the proposed financial institution will be run on sound commercial principles, even as it adopts a more supportive posture toward small and medium-sized businesses.
“What I’m saying to people, those persons, again, who are anxiously and eagerly awaiting the coming of the bank: it’s a bank; it’s not a charity. So, it’s a situation where we are going to manage it on business principles, but it will be much more supportive to small businesses. There will be an environment of encouragement, of support, of mentorship, and so on to help these businesses, small businesses, to succeed.”
He told reporters that the success of the development bank will not be measured by dividends paid to the government, but by its impact on the wider economy, adding that the bank’s design would take into account concerns raised by the IMF about the governance of such institutions and the risk of adding to government debt.
Beyond the development bank and sector-specific projects, Prime Minister Friday announced that Taiwan has agreed to provide one million US dollars annually in grant funding to support a range of social and community empowerment programmes.
He said this support will be used partly to seed the long discussed constituency development fund, and that the grant would be directed at specific groups, particularly women and young people.
“This is all, you know, very, very good opportunity for us to be able to, as we say, put money into people’s pockets by making them productive. So that if we invest $100, they can make $200 from it. That’s the way you do it,” he said.
“This trip gave us a lot of possibilities. Some of them will bear fruit more quickly than others, but we are moving towards that.”
CMC/kbc/ir/2026