St Michael South Central

Marsha Caddle is an economist and public policy strategist.

A former Minister for Economic Affairs and Investment in Barbados from 2018-2022 and as one of the authors of the 2018 Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation Plan, she 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 Caddle 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.

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 30 countries, and she has written and spoken extensively on matters of equality and economic justice.

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