00:00U.S. International Development Finance Corporation Chief Policy Officer Caroline Vick spoke with The Express and TV6 News after having
00:08joined U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Feinstein at a meeting with a delegation led by Prime Minister
00:17Kamala Passat-Bissessa.
00:18We're looking at lots of ports, airports, strategic corridors, as well as everything under the digital infrastructure bucket, so subsea
00:25cables, terrestrial fiber, telecom, and data centers, all financing trusted vendors.
00:32So our objective here in Trinidad is to engage with the government as we're doing, understand their investment priorities both
00:39in terms of sectors and specific projects that are high priority of the Prime Minister and her cabinet,
00:45and then we'll go and find sort of where those priorities intersect with ours is where we'll focus our efforts,
00:51and then we'll go find private sector companies that we can execute on those priorities with.
00:57The visit of the U.S. delegation occurred after the official announcement on Friday about three memoranda of understanding signed
01:04by Trinidad and Tobago and the United States to establish frameworks for cooperation in large-scale data center development,
01:11artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the re-commissioning of the iron and steel plant at Point Lises for strategic metals production.
01:19The DFC chief policy officer spoke about the issue of data centers in general.
01:25Look, there's a role in every economy this day and age for data centers.
01:29It's up to every country to decide how they want to approach it, what kind of presence they would like
01:35it to be, but we stand ready to make investments where they make sense.
01:40And the chief policy officer said the DFC has a large amount of funding to make investments with.
01:46As of last December, the DFC was reauthorized, and that reauthorization took us from $60 to $205 billion and expanded
01:55the number of countries that we're able to invest in.
01:57So Trinidad is a new market for us.
01:59We are now open in the rest of the Caribbean as well, which is new, where we used to be
02:04restricted to a smaller number of countries.
02:06So we're here to do business development, to build our pipeline, and hopefully identify some projects that we can execute
02:12on over the next couple of years.
02:14The point was made that the DFC does not have any quotas per country or per region.
02:20We should think of the DFC as the U.S. government's international investment arm.
02:25As I said, we have $205 billion to invest globally.
02:28We do debt, equity, political risk insurance, loan guarantees, and project development funds.
02:35And you should think of us as somewhere between a development finance institution and a sovereign wealth fund, what our
02:41CEO is calling a strategic investment fund.
02:45So our mission is to advance the economic development of our allies and partners and advance American foreign policy.
02:51And we do that through making commercially viable investments.
02:55The DFC chief policy officer said the U.S. delegation visited Jamaica on Monday.
02:59And after their visit to Trinidad and Tobago, they will then go on to Antigua and Barbuda on Wednesday before
03:05returning to Washington.
03:08Jewel Brown, TV6 News.
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