Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaking at the 16th Raúl Prebisch Lecture held in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 10, 2019. Photo by Timothy Sullivan (UNCTAD) on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0. Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley has never hesitated to step out boldly onto the world stage. Her island (population less than 300,000) continues to “punch above its weight.” For the past year, Prime Minister Mottley has focused on the area of trade and investment, challenging entrenched attitudes, embracing new ideas, and urging greater cooperation among nations. Speaking at the inaugural event of the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s Presidential Lecture Series on March 23 this year at the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva, Mottley asserted that a new global order is needed: [It] requires a next generation WTO committed to calling out obstacles to equitable trade, committed to being even more representative, acting as a countervailing, reforming force against the tendency to narrow, exclusive trade relationships, with a seat at the highest tables to promote the international trade dimension to the world’s problems. As an example of this continued focus, Barbados recently hosted the first ever AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum, which took place on September 1 and 2, and was livestreamed on YouTube. Its theme was very much in the spirit of pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey’s famous quote, “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” On the opening day, Mottley shared on Twitter: History was made today as the Caribbean and Africa came together for the inaugural AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum. Under the theme of “One People. One Destiny. Uniting and Reimagining Our Future,” I believe this event will be a turning point for our regions. — Mia Amor Mottley (@miaamormottley) September 1, 2022 In her short Twitter thread, Mottley stressed that the meeting — held in partnership with the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) — was not just about “spiritual reconnection,” but also had specific objectives in strengthening the relationship between the two regions, including “creating a business case for a potential AfriCaribbean Free Trade Area” and “promoting inter-bank relationships.” Over 2,300 representatives (mostly from the private sector) attended — including 49 African countries, 16 Caribbean countries, and a number of Latin American and Middle Eastern participants — and hopes are high that the event achieved tangible results. President of Afreximbank Professor Benedict Okey Oramah observed at the closing ceremony: We keep our promises. We didn’t travel all these thousands of kilometres to come and make a show. We came here for a purpose. Coming here is an investment towards that end. […] The benefits of that investment are concrete results coming out of the commitment we make here. You are going to see, in the next few months, actual things on the ground. Prime Minister Mottley added that the two regions might be able to “forever to remove the scars of the middle passage” through greater cooperation on a range of development issues, including several challenges they have in common: We, children of independence, have determined that we shall not allow another generation to pass without bringing together that which should have never been torn asunder. We face common battles from the climate crisis to the COVID pandemic, now to the third aspect of it, with respect to inflation and debt that threaten to tear too many of our countries apart and threaten to put back into poverty too many of our people […] These travel dependent economies, whether in Africa or in the Caribbean, have literally been thrown on their backs and we seek to fight this battle of bridging and reclaiming our Atlantic destiny on both sides, at the very time when the travel and tourism industry is facing its greatest challenge in decades […] We can choose to record that as but another major battle, or we can say as my country has done, even in the midst of an IMF programme, that if you do not seize our destiny now, we will never seize it. Mottley is building on her role as President of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), almost exactly one year after her election to the post on September 6, 2021. Barbados hosted UNCTAD’s quadrennial ministerial conference (UNCTAD15) from October 3 to 7, 2021, with the challenging theme “From inequality and vulnerability to prosperity for all.” The Prime Minister took a delegation of officials from the United Nations, UNCTAD and CARICOM, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, on a tour of the island during their visit.