The Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank is advancing a US$200 million first-loss portfolio guarantee with the government of France, according to reporting from Paris attributed to the Caribbean Media Corporation.
A first-loss portfolio guarantee is a specific tool in development finance. The party offering the guarantee — in this case, France — agrees to absorb the initial losses on a defined portfolio of loans, lowering the risk for other lenders and unlocking capital that would otherwise stay on the sidelines. For the Caribbean Development Bank, the structure means the institution can extend financing to projects across its membership at terms it could not otherwise offer.
The arrangement comes during a sustained shift in how multilateral finance is reaching the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago this week became the first English-speaking Caribbean country to host a permanent World Bank Group office. KPMG has opened in Guyana. ECLAC’s regional growth forecast for 2026 puts the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean at 5.6 percent — though that headline figure is heavily influenced by Guyana’s 16.3 percent expansion. Stripped of Guyana, regional growth falls to 1.2 percent.
That uneven distribution is the backdrop against which the CDB’s France guarantee matters. The countries growing slowest are precisely the ones for which a first-loss guarantee changes which projects pencil out. The Caribbean has more capital arriving than at any point in recent years. The question — and the policy story underneath every announcement — is which countries actually see it deployed.
Source: Caribbean Media Corporation, dateline Paris, via Jamaica Observer (April 30 - May 1, 2026).