Marsha Caddle M.P.

BARBADOS

Marsha Caddle was born and grew up with her two older sisters in Sinckler Road, Haggatt Hall, St. Michael to her mother, a seamstress who later became a nursing assistant and childcare attendant, and her father, an electrician. She went to her beloved Belmont Primary School and then Harrison College, during which time she fell in love with dance and music, spending time in training, performance and choreography with Pinelands Creative Workshop and the Barbados Dance Theatre, and as part of the chorale and leader of the Dance Ministry at the church her family attended, Carringtons Wesleyan in Welches, St. Michael.

From very early, Marsha developed a strong sense of social justice and Caribbean identity, starting her volunteer work as a teenager to help set up a shelter for survivors of gender-based violence in her community, and then as a youth peer counsellor at the shelter. This work led her as an adult to set up the Women’s Health Advocacy Network, an organization to help women surviving cancer and violence, and confronting issues of sexual and reproductive health.

Throughout, the fact of poverty in her own community and those around her became for her the first and central problem to help solve. And it led her, after UWI Cave Hill, to graduate studies in Economics in the Dominican Republic, followed by a career of some years with the UN, first managing the Economic Security and Rights Programme of the then United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) Caribbean from 2002, and then the Poverty Reduction Programme at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Eastern Caribbean from 2010. After this, she led the Governance practice at the Caribbean Development Bank until 2016, when in October, she was nominated by the St. Michael South Central branch of the Barbados Labour Party to be their candidate in the 2018 general election.

Coming to Government as an economist and public policy strategist, she held the portfolio of Minister for Economic Affairs and Investment from 2018-2022 and as one of the authors of the 2018 Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation Plan, helped lead Barbados’ economic recovery programme, helping to restore foreign reserves eightfold by the end of the term, and seeing debt and arrears fall by a third following an international and domestic debt restructuring. In this role, she was also Barbados’s ministerial lead on climate finance, climate finance ministerial negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the COP global climate summit, and she led the first reform of physical planning processes and land use policy in Barbados in over 50 years.

In her last role as Barbados’ Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology, she quickly established the country’s cybersecurity capacity, creating a National Cybersecurity Unit jointly with the Barbados Defence Force and private sector as an interim measure, before identifying the country’s first Government CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) who would oversee a new, fit-for-purpose cybersecurity infrastructure of people and systems. She also operationalized GovTech Barbados, the State-owned company leading a digital transformation of Government that emphasizes people-focused public services that work for all, and started a programme to bring AI and other technology training and compute capacity to an emerging generation of technologists trying to solve local and global problems.

Marsha has written and spoken extensively on matters of equality and economic justice. With her work experience in economic policy and human development having spanned over 30 countries, Marsha also now serves as President and Chief Economist of the Bold Centre, and on other global boards in industries from insurance to technology.

A dancer, singer, songwriter and guitarist, Marsha has also played football since the age of 17, and is a certified personal trainer. She credits a lot of this experience in dance, music and sport at the community level with her own approach to representation, staying close to the ground to see, feel and hear how people live every day, and working to provide the kinds of opportunities people need to thrive.