Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell addresses the opening of the 4th Annual AfriCaribbean Commerce and Funding Discussion board in St. George, Grenada on Monday, July 28, 2025.
Picture courtesy Afreximbank
Within the clearest signal but that Africa and the Caribbean are in a rush to forge stronger commerce and different ties, leaders, enterprise executives, and different delegates from each areas assembled in Grenada for the 4th Annual AfriCaribbean Commerce and Funding Discussion board – ACTIF 2025 this week, decided to make this close to funding frontier work for either side.
Convention officers report that greater than 800 delegates from 70 nations are within the metropolis for the three-day convention, which ends on Wednesday. Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell mentioned the time was now to do issues in a different way by permitting commerce, funding, cultural, and different ties to dominate life between Africa and the Caribbean slightly than the legacy of the transatlantic slave commerce.
“As soon as we had been linked by ships that tore us aside. Now we should join by commerce routes that carry us collectively, to not extract, however to speculate, to not exploit, however to empower,” Mitchell mentioned, hailing the presence of the African Export-Import Financial institution (Afreximbank), which is offering tons of of tens of millions in growth financing to governments and the regional non-public sector. “The financial institution has not simply been a financier. It has been and can proceed to be a companion in delivering progress, a catalyst for techniques change.”
After he and different delegates had spoken on the opening ceremony, financial institution executives, governments, and personal sector officers signed off on tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} in loans, together with a $250 million portfolio for a world-class tertiary hospital in Grenada and a $100 million disbursement for infrastructural works in The Bahamas, amongst others.
Outgoing financial institution president Professor Benedict Oramah introduced that the financial institution has already mobilized over $3 billion to fund a number of initiatives within the Caribbean and can assist to finance the institution of a everlasting fee to drive commerce, funding, and different alternatives between the 2 areas. “Such a fee must be sovereign, however nonetheless supported by Afreximbank, the CARICOM, and the African Union. The Atlantic Ocean as soon as carried our ancestors in chains. As we glance forward, we should now remodel it from a grave of reminiscence right into a gateway of prosperity. This 12 months’s discussion board is critical to me personally because it marks the final time I’d be addressing you on this platform as president of Afreximbank. What we have now finished thus far is show the idea; we now must institutionalize it,” he mentioned.
As a sign of how necessary this rising collaboration is being seen, regional leaders, together with Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit of Dominica, Prime Minister Terrance Drew of St. Kitts and Nevis, Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre of St. Lucia, and Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua, all flew to Grenada to attend the discussion board.
Additionally attending are Kassim Majaliwa, Prime Minister of Tanzania, Prudence Sebahizi, Minister of Commerce and Business, Rwanda, former Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria, and Mahamadou Issoufou, former President of Niger, amongst others.
Host PM Mitchell additionally touched on the everlasting secretariat to supervise every day contact and implementation efforts, noting that” we welcome and assist the creation of a International Africa Fee. We look ahead to our CARICOM residents visiting lots of the African states. We owe it to our younger women and men. We acknowledge that we’re in a seminal second, however that we’re not ranging from scratch. We’re ranging from power.”
