On April 1, 2025, when Ghana’s Shirley Botchwey will take the oath of office to lead the 2.7 billion people of the world’s eight billion, Ms. Patricia Scotland, an Amazon on the global stage, will officially end her nine-year, nine-year, eventful tenure as the first female Commonwealth Secretary General. For her, it’s a privilege serving one-third of the world’s population and it’s time for some deserved rest. She appeared on the Diplomatic Channel program on Channels Television.
Enjoy the excerpts…
As you approach your departure from the company, take us on a memory lane, and show us what it was like for you to take over as president, along with your hopes, fears, aspirations, and ambitions.
In 2015, people said the Commonwealth was in need of real change. Because the Commonwealth was working with so many different nations, I never accepted it. Now we’re 56 countries, 2.7 billion people with 60% under the age of 30 and an opportunity to expand economically and socially to meet the goals of the Commonwealth Charter. Through collaboration, I saw all this potential and opportunity. We have some of the fastest growing cities, we have one language, we have the same legal system, the same parliamentary system, similar institutions. I kept thinking that if interoperability is actually working for us, it could significantly improve the performance of all of our nations. The Commonwealth had done something remarkable, they had done a trade review in 2015 just before I came in which recognised that they had then a 19% advantage, but we weren’t using it. What if we can reduce that 19% to 30%, make it simpler, and move things more quickly? so I came in with that aspiration but we saw we were doing an amazing amount on good governance, on elections, on helping our countries to stay safe.
What about our women’s programs and our youth programs? Because if we were going to get really rich, we needed to empower our women and we looked at issues of climate change because in speaking to all the leaders, one thing you get to do before you come in is to talk to the leaders, listen to them, try and understand what it is that they aspire to do and they constantly talked about climate change being an omnipresent threat, particularly for the 25 small island developing states because they were literally on the frontline.
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What about the the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which had been agreed in 2015? How will they be put into practice? How are we going to get the money because there was a gap between the money we had and the money we needed to deliver the SDGs?
So that went on my hit list. If you recall the first 100 days, I had all those subjects covered, and the president of Nigeria basically declared that he wanted his money back because it was being siphoned off elsewhere. We also held our first anti-corruption summit. So, immediately, we thought so what are we going to do? We must find a way to put policies and laws into practice, making them unique, and that’s not enough.
So, that’s what we started to do and in the first two years we created the regenerative approach to development to reverse climate change and when I said that in 2016 people said this woman’s crazy. Reversal, adaptation, and even regenerative development are something that we are aware of. But we had all the experts from across the Commonwealth and elsewhere come to work with us. We came up with the idea that because the world was spinning more quickly and steadily and that mitigating it wasn’t going to be enough, we had to find a way to stop it.
So, in 2016 we went to COP (United Nations Climate Change Conference) and we said we need regenerative development to reverse climate change. No one is doing anything about oceans, as we stated at the conference that we had to do something about oceans. So, having listened to all my countries I said I think we need a charter, what we called the Blue Charter.
Everyone said this woman is crazy because it takes 10 years to complete a concept and you only have 10 years. We only have 10 months until the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which I believe will be held because all of our nations have the political will to do so.
So, we went to the UN General Assembly, it was at that stage Fiji was in the chair and Fiji had an oceans conference and the prime minister very generously when I phoned him up and said could he possibly find a little space for the Commonwealth? This is what I have.
Let’s talk about climate a bit more. With President Donald Trump’s position on climate and how he typically leads the country forward, climate is a more intriguing topic right now. What are your thoughts?
Since 1989, the Commonwealth has realized the existential nature of this threat. The Commonwealth was the first international organisation to call it out in 1989 when they met in Langkawi in Malaysia and the Commonwealth said then that if we did not address climate change, all the things that have happened in the last 30 years would happen and it’s quite shocking when you go back and look at what what Commonwealth said then.
Climate is a constant threat to our 56 countries, even if you don’t consider the rest of the world. The 25 small island developing states are just 25 of the country. Some of them feel as if they don’t know whether they’ll live till tomorrow. Ministers have said in some of the tiny states, “I left my country, I don’t know if it’ll be there when I try to land home because the sea is rising so high,” according to what I’ve heard. My whole country may be subsumed”.
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Financing, especially for developing countries, is the other side of that. What will tip this in the right direction?
It involves, in my opinion, comprehending the sources of the threats. We have tried to create a model which most people now believe works. So, if you consider what we did for the Climate Finance Access Hub, the majority of the countries who are most disadvantaged by climate have essentially nothing to do with the problem, but they are still paying the price. The COP, as you know, made a commitment to assist those who had suffered unfairly as a result of those climatic changes for which they were not responsible and yet if you look at the percentage of money that those countries have got, they’re negligible.
So, the Commonwealth, before I came suggested that we should create a mechanism which would help member states to make good successful applications to the green and other funds because they were spending millions of dollars on applications which were not actually getting them anywhere. So I created that when I first started the job that was assigned to me: creating a Commonwealth Climate Finance Access. We created in Mauritius a centre where we could work with the different funds, understand what they needed, how they needed it, what form do they come in and we would be able clear with our member states. After these criteria are established, climate finance advisors are dispatched to the nations to assist in the data collection. Many of our countries didn’t have their own data, so who has the data? We discovered that the UN has numerous space agencies and that the UN has a lot of data. We have the British space agency, we got the data together and we helped our countries to make applications and not only for individuals.
Then, we organized the advisers in each of our member states so they could review and refine each other’s applications. So, instead of having one, you had 20 looking at these and gradually we got better and better. Applications would initially take two or three years. Our latest was just Fiji, a nature-based seawall, $5.7 million was needed and we were able to make the application, and have it granted within 12 months because we used geospatial data and AI. We gave the information to the adaptation fund, which they granted because it was clearly stated in an AI simulator that this is how you do it.
Now what’s amazing is there are probably 23 other small island developing states who need something similar. Therefore, finance is essential if the change is to occur, but we’ve also created a Commonwealth Universal Vulnerability Index because, as we’ve already mentioned, some small nations, including my own country of birth, Dominica, were hit twice in 2015 when 95% of our GDP was wiped out of the middle-income nation. Then two years later in 2017, 226% of our GDP was wiped out.
So we changed from having middle-class families to having no income. Now you cannot base assistance on GDP when in six hours you can have your whole economy obliterated and so we’ve come up with the universal vulnerability index. Additionally, we have a lot to do with our debt. We’ve created something called Meridian which is a debt management system which manages both public and private debt for our member states. I believe there are about 45 trillion dollars in debt under management, but a lot of that debt was created as a result of dealing with climate disasters because, regrettably, the hurricane doesn’t take the debt and dumps it back into the sea, so you have to go find more money to rebuild it.
It’s a privilege to serve a third of the world and I certainly think it’s one of the greatest honours of my life and if I have been able to make a small contribution to making it better for the 2.7 billion people, we all serve and the 56 leaders who are struggling to deliver for their countries and who are thirsting for the same thing and sharing the same values, then I’ll be more than content
What’s the first thing you’re doing as soon as you step out of the office and what’s the future for you?
Source: Channels TV
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