Commonwealth needs to embrace new thinking on climate finance, urban development – VP Jagdeo

– calls for inclusion of small states in digital transformation

Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo on Saturday urged Commonwealth countries to make the most of new opportunities to access climate finance and advance development.
These calls were made as the VP joined a Commonwealth roundtable on the Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation, which was adopted in Kigali back in 2022.
The roundtable, supported by The King’s Foundation, brought together member states, along with experts and civil society organisations, to address how to manage rapid urbanisation while improving the quality of life, strengthening economic opportunity, and building resilience.
Commonwealth leaders have spoken repeatedly of its role as a platform for practical cooperation.
One example is the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub – developed from work VP Jagdeo chaired and presented at the 2014 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Colombo.
Twelve years later – and now headquartered in Mauritius – the Hub has helped mobilise nearly US$500 million in climate finance, supported over 100 projects, and deployed expert advisers across more than 15 countries.
Speaking after Saturday’s roundtable session, VP 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 homegrown 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.”
According to Jagdeo, who crafted the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) – Guyana’s economic model for sustainable development – Commonwealth stakeholders focused on urbanisation during the session, that is, how to plan and build cities that are liveable, productive, and attractive for investment and jobs. But he noted that the same challenges are seen right across all areas of development and that increasingly means the need for better data and applications that can use the data.
In fact, the VP referenced the recent India AI Impact Summit he attended in New Delhi in February, which brought together Heads of Government and leaders from major technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. There, Jagdeo said he 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, it 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,” VP Jagdeo stated.
Only back in February, the Guyanese VP raised similar concerns at the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) in New Delhi – a global event hosted annually by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) that allows for dialogue on climate action, sustainability, and green development.
In his address at the WSDS, the VP had called on international stakeholders to develop frameworks to help small countries in the Global South to overcome their capacity gaps and AI for sustainable development and climate action.
“We have to…start thinking about how to help the smaller countries of the South, particularly in building small templates or approaches where they can bypass the reluctance or the gap in knowledge at the local level and use AI fully for development, including to help us solve climate issues,” Jagdeo said.
According to the VP, there cannot be a conversation about sustainable development without bringing AI into the mix. “We can’t say the focus of this summit is on transformation and not examine the challenge that AI will bring to sustainable issues,” he stated.
Citing issues of size, lack of capacity, and other complexities, Jagdeo pointed out that many Global South countries, already grappling with technology gaps, are at risk of a new challenge with AI.
“India has great capacity… That is not so for many other countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, and so those countries cannot now suffer a new development challenge of compute and data divide.” That will happen, and if we don’t want that to happen, we have to work out templates…for those countries to follow so that they can organise their AI diffusion, because there’s hardly AI development in those smaller countries.”
To this end, Jagdeo called on international organisations like TERI to assist Governments in these small countries to integrate AI into national development strategies, especially in areas of education and healthcare. These efforts, he underscored, are even more important at a time when there are reluctance and fear surrounding AI.
This past week, VP Jagdeo travelled to the United Kingdom (UK), where he had a series of high-level engagements. On Tuesday, he met with King Charles III at Dumfries House in Scotland.
Jagdeo also participated in engagements with The King’s Foundation, including the team supporting Guyana’s programme to advance sustainable urban development, as well as representatives from across the Commonwealth, focusing on advancing sustainable development, low-carbon growth, and practical solutions for vulnerable countries.