Prime Minister Bruce Golding has called on the Commonwealth to take a fresh approach to the challenges facing heavily indebted middle-income countries, such as Jamaica.

According to a Jamaica House release, Golding made the call on Friday during a special meeting of Caribbean heads with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on the margins of the Commonwealth summit in Kampala, Uganda, which ends today. Golding pointed out that a number of countries in the Caribbean required new responses to their debt problems to enable them to accelerate economic growth and social development.

While paying tribute to the United Kingdom (U.K.) for initiating the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt-relief programme, which has benefited a number of countries, Prime Minister Golding said he wanted multilateral financial institutions and the Group of Eight (G8) countries to examine the issues facing developing countries. These, he said, were not regarded as poor enough to qualify for concessionary loans, but they, nevertheless, had to reduce their spending on important social services because of the high debt burden and debt-service costs.

These factors, Golding said, were hindering the prospects of countries like those in the Caribbean from achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In this context, the Prime Minister said "access to financing and refinancing would be of enormous assistance to the Caribbean".

The British Prime Minister welcomed the proposal and suggested that the Commonwealth heads meeting in Uganda support a call to international financial institutions urging them to be more responsive to the real needs of the present time and the challenges facing their client countries.