Ms Patricia Scotland, an amazon on the global stage, will wrap up her nine-year eventful tenure as the first female Commonwealth Secretary General, on April 1, 2025, when Ghana’s Shirley Botchwey will take the baton to lead 2.7 billion people of the world’s eight billion. For her, it’s a privilege serving one-third of the world’s population and it’s time for some deserved rest. She was a guest on Channels Television’s Diplomatic Channel programme.

Enjoy the excerpts…

You’re about to leave office but walk us on memory lane; play a picture of what your coming into office was like for you, your hopes, fears, aspirations, ambitions.

In 2015, people said the Commonwealth was in need of real change. I never accepted it because the Commonwealth was doing so many different countries. 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. I saw all this potential and opportunity through collaboration. We have some of the fastest growing cities, we have one language, we have the same legal system, the same parliamentary system, similar institutions. So, I kept on thinking if we get this interoperability really working for us, we could exponentially improve all our countries’ performance. 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. So, I started to think what if we can turn that 19% into 30% cheaper, easier, faster? 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.

And then what about our youth programmes and what about our women? 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.

What about the the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which had been agreed in 2015? How are we going to implement them? 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 looked at the first 100 days, I had all those topics, and we held our first anti-corruption summit and we had a fantastic contribution made by the President of Nigeria who basically said he wanted his money back because the money that had been siphoned off was no longer in Africa, it was elsewhere. So, immediately, we thought so what are we going to do? It’s not enough just to create policies and create legislation, we have got to find a way of implementing it, making it different.

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. We know about adaptation, but reversal, what is it even regenerative development? But we had all the experts from across the Commonwealth and elsewhere come to work with us. We came up with the idea that adapting and mitigating wasn’t going to be enough, we’re going to have to find a way to reverse it because the world was spinning faster and faster and it was getting worse and worse.

So, in 2016 we went to COP (United Nations Climate Change Conference) and we said we need regenerative development to reverse climate change. At that conference, we said we’ve got to do something about oceans, nobody’s doing anything about oceans. So, having listened to all my countries I said I think we need a charter, what we called the Blue Charter.

So, everyone said this woman really is crazy because it takes 10 years to get from concept to order and you haven’t got 10 years, we had 10 months to the next CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) and people said it can’t be done and I thought it can be because all our countries are committed to it and we have the political will.

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? I’ve got this idea.

Let’s talk about climate a bit more. Climate is a more interesting conversation now, particularly with President Donald Trump and his stance on climate and how he tends to move America forward. What are your thoughts?

Well, the Commonwealth understood the existential nature of this threat since 1989. 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.

Even if you don’t think about the rest of the world, for our 56 countries, climate is an omnipresent threat for the 25 small island developing states. Some of them feel as if they don’t know whether they’ll live till tomorrow. Some of the tiny states, I’ve heard ministers say: “I left my country, I don’t know whether it’ll be there when I try to land home because the sea is rising so high. My whole country may be subsumed.”

The other side to that is financing, especially for developing nations. What will tip this in the right direction?

I think it is understanding where the threats are coming from. We have tried to create a model which most people now believe works. So, if you look at what we did for the Climate Finance Access Hub, most of the countries who are most disadvantaged by climate contributed virtually nothing to the creation of the problem, yet they are 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 came in, that was the job that was given to me that we should create 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. These are the criteria, then we put climate finance advisors in the countries to help the member states pull the data. Many of our countries didn’t have their own data, so who has the data? We discovered that the UN has a lot of the data, UN has space agencies. We have the British space agency, we got the data together and we helped our countries to make applications and not only for individuals.

We then got all the advisers in each of our member states to work together so they would peer review one another’s applications, they would perfect them. So, instead of having one, you had 20 looking at these and gradually we got better and better. Initially, applications would 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 put the data into an AI simulator which told us really graphically this is how you do it, this is where you put it and we put that information to the adaptation fund and they granted it.

Now what’s amazing is there are probably 23 other small island developing states who need something similar. So, finance is critical if we’re going to make the change but we’ve also created a Commonwealth Universal Vulnerability Index because what we’re also saying is it cannot just be about GDP, some of the small countries, my own country of birth Dominica was hit twice, once in 2015 when 95% of our GDP was wiped out of the middle-income country. Then two years later in 2017, 226% of our GDP was wiped out.

So, we went from middle income to 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. Also, there’s a lot for us to do on 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 think we’ve got about $45 trillion under management by debt but if you look at that, lots of that debt has been created as a result of dealing with climate disasters because when you have your country annihilated and a hurricane comes and takes all your roads, your bridges, your hospitals, your buildings and dumps them in the sea, regrettably the hurricane doesn’t take the debt with it and dump back in the sea; the hurricane lives the debt behind and you have to go and borrow more money to build back better.

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

Ms Patricia Scotland, an amazon on the global stage, wraps up her nine-year eventful tenure as the first female Commonwealth Secretary General, on April 1, 2025.

What’s the first thing you’re doing as soon as you step out of the office and what’s the future for you?

Well, the first thing I’m going to do probably is to go straight back to the House of Lords but I think I have a date with sleep. So, I hope that I will get some sleep, the 20-hour a day. I suddenly realised I was supposed to have 30-day holiday a year, I don’t think I had a day and that’s because something was always happening. Can you imagine someone saying there’s a coup? And I say: “Well, I’m sorry I’m on holiday or I’m sleeping.” So, I suppose we warn my sister. Well, she probably knows it already. It’s a 24-hour job and if you want a holiday better take it before you start. (AFP)