IGF 2025 Parliamentary Track

Marsha Caddle is a Barbadian economist and public policy strategist.

A former Minister for Economic Affairs and Investment in Barbados from 2018-2022, she helped lead Barbados’ 2018 economic recovery programme, restoring 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. She has been ministerial negotiator on climate finance for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), introducing in the Glasgow 2021 UNFCCC outcome document for the first time the use of specialized financial instruments like redistributed Special Drawing Rights for scaled up finance in climate vulnerable nations. She also led the first reform of physical planning and land use policy in over 50 years.

She has led the Governance practice at the Caribbean Development Bank, the Poverty Reduction Programme at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Eastern Caribbean, and the Economic Security and Rights Programme of the then United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) Caribbean.

In her most recent role as Barbados' Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology, she has driven the establishment of a data and technology industry in Barbados, backed by the distribution of AI computational power to startups and research technologists, to help them build solutions to local and global problems. She also worked on Barbados’s Sustainable Industrial Policy to ensure a just, low-carbon transition at the center of the country’s economic growth and diversification.

She is a pioneer economist in gender equitable macroeconomic policy frameworks, and is a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and the International Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics (GEM-IWG).

Her areas of work are climate finance and green industrial policy; poverty, inequality and human development; public investment, growth and competitiveness; financing for development; physical planning; and data and national statistics. Her work experience in economic policy and human development spans over 20 countries, and she has written and spoken extensively on matters of equality and economic and climate justice.

Marsha Caddle is now President and Chief Economist of the Bold Centre, and is an elected Member of Parliament in the Barbados House of Assembly.