Crime across the Caribbean will be one of the issues addressed during a week-long conference hosted in Grand Cayman this week by the Caribbean Development Bank.
After all, you can’t do business if you don’t feel safe, development bank Vice President Yvette Lemonias Seale said during a briefing with the media last week.
“Increasing violent crime in many of the Caribbean Development Bank’s borrowing member countries represents a significant threat to economic and social development,” a statement released by the bank last week noted.
“[The bank] recognises the urgency with which this issue must be addressed if the region is not to lose the developmental momentum of the past two decades, or worse, experience an erosion in the socioeconomic gains attained.”
The Cayman Islands, a founding member of the Caribbean Development Bank in 1969, has not been a borrowing member of the bank in its recent past, although the bank has funded several projects historically including both the Owen Roberts International and Gerrard Smith International airports.
However, the territory can relate to concerns about violent crime, having experienced a record number of robberies during 2010 and 2011, as well as a number of gang-related shootings within the past year.
On Wednesday afternoon at The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, a discussion panel “Improving Citizen Security in the Region”, will be held to discuss a number of the crime issues plaguing not only the Cayman Islands, but the Caribbean as a whole in recent years.
Panellists include Professor Anthony Harriott of the University of the West Indies Institute of Criminal Justice, Barbadian poet Adisa Andwele and Professor Richard Bennett of American University in Washington DC.
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