Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo on Friday urged Commonwealth countries to make the most of new opportunities to access climate finance and advance development.
He joined a Commonwealth roundtable on the Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation, adopted in Kigali in 2022. The roundtable, supported by The King’s Foundation, brought together member states, experts and civil society organisations to address how to manage rapid urbanisation while improving quality of life, strengthening economic opportunity, and building resilience.
Commonwealth leaders have repeatedly highlighted its role as a platform for practical cooperation. One example is the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub—developed from work Jagdeo chaired and presented at the 2014 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2014 in Colombo. Twelve years later, and now headquartered in Mauritius, the Hub has helped mobilise nearly US$500 million in climate finance, supported more than 100 projects, and deployed expert advisers across over 15 countries.
Speaking afterwards, Jagdeo said:
“The progress of the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub is welcome and important. It shows what can be achieved when countries are given practical support to turn home-grown ideas into investable projects.
But the scale of today’s climate and development challenges requires far more.
Helping all our people to secure better lives now requires managing complexity at a speed and scale not seen before.
We need new thinking, new tools, and a step change in how the international community supports developing countries and smaller states.
Today, Commonwealth stakeholders focused on urbanisation—how we plan and build cities that are liveable, productive, and attractive for investment and jobs. But the same challenges are seen across all areas of development—and that increasingly means the need for better data and applications that can use that data.
At the recent AI Summit in New Delhi—which brought together heads of government and leaders from technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI—I saw how artificial intelligence is already strengthening planning and accelerating decision-making across the world.
This presents a major opportunity—but only if it works for everyone.
As I said today, if AI models are not trained on data from small and developing countries, they will not work for them.
So we must invest now—in solutions, both traditional and AI-driven—that support small countries and the developing world. The Commonwealth—home to about a third of the world’s people—can play a leading role.”
