The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Deputy Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

THE Disaster Reconstruction Authority now says that grants and in-kind services raised during the Hurricane Dorian Pledging Conference amounted to $1.8bn, but only $364,000 was in actual cash and deposits. Following the January conference, officials said donors had pledged $1.5bn in funding and other services.

Yesterday, DRA Managing Director Kay Forbes-Smith said after further assessment of the full scope of pledges, the revised amount from the conference was “very close” to $1.8bn. However, she declined to make public individual donor identities. During the event, the most speculated and talked about pledge was from the P3 Group and its president, Dee Brown, who announced that $975m in loans at concessionary rates would be made available to The Bahamas.

But two months after the extraordinary pledge was made, Mrs Forbes-Smith said no decision had been made on whether this was an offer that would be accepted.

Officials have not formally gone into “detailed” discussions with P3 or any other entity and the DRA has yet to delve deeply into the details of pledges made, she said.

Mrs Forbes-Smith spoke of the matter during a six-month, post-Hurricane Dorian press conference at the University of the Bahamas.

“On January 13, 2020, the United Nations Development Programme organised a private sector Pledging Conference in New Providence and let me just say as well, according to the UNDP, this is the first time that they had ever organised a private sector pledge conference because normally when they do a pledge conference it’s usually a country-to-country kind of pledge conference,” she said.

“Bahamians and partners from around the world attended and made pledges to assist The Bahamas. This process happened in the open, in a room of hundreds of people with the media present.

“Initial assessments indicated that $1.5bn in recovery financing and in-kind services were pledged. As has been emphasised many times, these pledges were of various types of financing and services. They were not all cash and donations.

“The pledges included initiatives in home building and repair; educational assistance; renewable energy partnerships; relief aid; grants; direct assistance to storm victims; parks restoration; loans and financing.

“After further assessment of the full scope of pledges, the revised amount pledged was very close to $1.8bn.”

The breakdown includes: $41m in grants; $1.3bn in public-private partnerships; technical assistance worth $51m; $400m in other assistance and $364,000 in cash and deposits.

“Now these pledges line up this way according to our priorities as follows: the economy $102m; education $6m; environment $1m; health $670m; housing $51m; infrastructure $155m; $785m is not allocated; cash and deposits $364,000,” she said.

“And when I leave here today, tomorrow these numbers may change because we’re getting donations every day.”

Mrs Forbes-Smith continued: “It is up to the (Disaster Reconstruction) Authority and the government to determine which pledges are best for The Bahamas and the Bahamian people and this rebuilding effort. Discussions are ongoing with the various local and international groups that pledged.

“As the groups stated openly at the conference, some of the amounts they allocated include work already done to assist the residents of Grand Bahama and Abaco.”

Following the press conference, The Tribune asked the managing director to reveal the status of P3’s controversial offer.

“Well I don’t know why we are saying it was controversial,” she told this newspaper. “…Well that is part of why I said we have to sit down and we have to go through these pledges one by one and make a determination what’s in the best interest of the country.”

Asked if officials were at a point where they could definitively rule out the P3 pledge, she said: “No. The Disaster Reconstruction Authority along with our lead in our committees, which is our finance and audit committees, they have to get involved in this process as well. So we haven’t dug deep enough into any of these pledges yet to be able to say well we’re not going to use this one (or) we’re not taking this. We just haven’t gotten to that point yet.”

This is because the DRA simply does not have sufficient staff, Mrs Forbes-Smith said.

“We’re just going to be starting to actually work. We have to staff up. As you know part of what’s going on with the DRA is it’s a new entity so we need to staff up to a certain point.

“We’ve had successful interviews with a number of key positions that we’re taking on so we need to get our staff at the level that we need it to be at so that we can begin some of this work in earnest.

“So we want to make sure that we have our financial people on board before we start talking about financing and equity financing and loans and all of those kind of things so it’s really about getting our staffing right, making sure that our organisation is in play to be able to move forward on these things.”

Within the next three months, she said, the DRA would have hired the needed top tier level staffing to explore the pledge options.

As for the DRA’s decision to withhold donor identities, Mrs Forbes-Smith said: “…It’s very important for us even though people would have pledged equity financing opportunities or loans or grants or whatever, grants is a different story, but we have to be very careful.

“… The details is something that you really have to pay close attention to, so as I said before we have to make sure that whatever pledge comes in, when it comes to loans or equity financing, first of all the Ministry of Finance and the government of The Bahamas has to be involved in that as well.

“Secondly we have to pay close attention to the details of some of these pledges because as I said it may not be in the best interest of the people or the government or the country so we have to pay close attention to the details before we make public and say we are going to accept this or the next thing,” she also said.