The primary concern of Caribbean governments and peoples is for development that is authentic, sustainable, integral, and consonant with regional designs for progressive social, economic, and political integration. Since their independence, individual Caribbean countries have labored for economic and social development in the short term and agonized over maintaining appreciable levels of sustainable development in the long term. In the absence of any natural resources significant enough to sustain economic development, the Caribbean had to depend on its human resource potential as the raw material and the driving force of economic development. Over the decades the evolving global circumstances have posed, and continue to pose, indomitable challenges to the human resource capabilities of the Caribbean region. In that context the harnessing, management, utilization, and programming of such human resource capability for the development initiative is crucial, and therefore constitutes an enormous challenge for present leadership, as well as for that of the future.
Leadership plays a very important function in the development of any country.
On it rests the responsibility for making the crucial decisions, which are going to be important for the future of the entire country. On it lies the responsibility for applying perspicacity of vision in its planning, altruism in its actions, intelligence in programming, and above all a mastery of the complex matrix of factors, which define current national and international circumstances. Also, given current indicators, leaders have the responsibility to prognosticate on the salient features of future national, international, economic, and social circumstances as they will come to impact on development. In the particular case of the Caribbean such a challenge to leadership is very much part of the socio-economic landscape, and changes in the quality and demands of leadership are inevitable. Endogenous Caribbean leadership blossomed with independence, as in relatively quick succession various colonies in the Caribbean became autonomous nation-states.