A Chat with Dr. Armstrong Alexis, CARICOM’s Deputy Secretary General

Before CARICOM: The Career Journey

Chadia Mathurin: Can you chronicle for me what your career journey has been like?

Dr. Armstrong Alexis: So of course, as I mentioned I started off as a teacher. After Teachers’ College I served my bond, and took a leap of faith. I resigned from teaching and I went to work with the Saint Lucian National Youth Council as the NYC’s first full time General Secretary. At the time a lot of people thought that that was risky because NYC did not necessarily have very sustainable income streams. We designed projects, we had funding agencies that funded our programs, and teaching was basically a very stable job. But I always believed in taking calculated risks so I took that risk.

Thereafter I went off to university, continued my advocacy, became President of the Guild of Undergraduates at Mona; one of the few non-Jamaicans to lead the guild in Jamaica, and lectured at the university in Sociology – Social Research – for a couple of years, then decided to return to Saint Lucia, worked with government, and I saw a position advertised from the Commonwealth Secretariat for the post of Regional Director of the Commonwealth Youth Programme which I applied for and I was selected for that position. So my first international job was with the Commonwealth Secretariat. The regional office was based in Guyana, so I worked in Guyana for 6 years.

After that, I always had an interest in public life and politics so I went back to Saint Lucia, [and] explored the possibility of getting into politics. I did a run off for the Saint Lucia Labour Party, I won the run-off handsomely, I was selected as the Saint Lucia Labour Party candidate for the Gros-Islet constituency for the 2006 election, and frankly speaking, I was waking up every morning and not enjoying the life of a politician. And again, I took another calculated risk, I wrote to the then political leader, Kenny Anthony, and I said to him in as much as I would want to remain a member of the party I really do not think I have what it takes to be a front-line politician, and therefore I exited politics.

[I] saw a job again, advertised for the United Nations in Barbados, I applied and I got the job. [I] worked in Barbados for a while. Then came the Haiti earthquake in 2010, and I volunteered. I was one of the UNDP staff who volunteered to go to Haiti to assist in the re-establishment of the UNDP offices in Haiti. I’ve always described Haiti as an experience where – the limelight was on Haiti, so – staff who went there would have come out on two sides of the spectrum. You would have either left Haiti as an absolute success story or you would have left Haiti as an absolute failure. I guess I left Haiti as an absolute success story and from Haiti I was appointed Deputy Resident Representative for UNDP in Samoa in the Pacific and I then served as Head of Programmes and Operations in Fiji. So I did two countries in the Pacific. Then from there [I]went to Suriname, did 6 years in Suriname, and then Nigeria, Namibia with the UN. So I spent in total 14 and a half years with the UN and I would have worked across the Caribbean, Africa, I did a short stint in New York, many different countries [and] many different country offices. And then I was invited to consider taking up the position of Deputy Secretary General when the new Secretary General was appointed last August and I then left the UN for this new assignment as DSG [Deputy Secretary General] for CARICOM.

Whilst I would encourage any young person to absolutely take academics seriously, because you cannot reach the heights of your career without a sound academic background, one’s career is also determined largely by the networks that you create, by the organizations that you are a part of, by volunteering that you have provided in your community, at national level or otherwise. What shaped me a lot had to do with the fact that I was always a youth advocate. I was President of the Caribbean Federation of Youth, I was General Secretary of the Saint Lucia National Youth Council, I was one of those who formed a Catholic youth organization called the Archdiocesan Youth Council in Saint Lucia, I was involved with the Saint Lucia Teachers’ Union, [and] I was involved with NGOs across the Caribbean. As a result of that you find opportunities where your academic pursuits mesh with your advocacy, mesh with your love for country, for region and you become known for a particular approach to doing things so when your application reaches the desk of a potential employer, you’re not only competing on your academic qualifications because the truth is 90% of the people who applied for the position also qualify. So what distinguishes one qualified person from another qualified person? It’s your reputation, the fact that people can associate with you and what you stand for and that means you need to be able to stand for something and that is what helps me for my career to move in the direction that it did because in addition to having the academic qualifications for the job, I had the experience which you gain only by doing it and as you get older and you keep on doing the same things and you keep expanding your horizons you gain the necessary experience but you also have to have a particular reputation for results. And that is what helped me.

Chadia Mathurin: Before we talk about CARICOM and your role there, what would you say are your three foremost gleanings from your time within the international relations/ international affairs space.

Dr. Armstrong Alexis: I think the first thing for me is confidence. I have gained a tremendous amount of confidence. I remain very grassroots oriented. I can go to Gros-Islet and sit on the block and hang out. I can dine with kings and I can hang out with ordinary people.

I can dine with kings and I can hang out with ordinary people.

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Chadia Mathurin: I call it the block and the boardroom.

[laughs]

Dr. Armstrong Alexis: Yes. The block and the boardroom. Yes absolutely. So I have gained a tremendous amount of confidence as an individual; as a professional. That confidence helps me when I do public speaking, it helps me when I move around in circles that can sometimes be a little uncomfortable or uncertain. So that’s the first thing that I can say that I’ve gained. The second thing is that I have been tremendously fortunate to have been exposed to practically every continent on this earth. I have worked in the Pacific, I have worked in the Caribbean, I have worked in Africa, [and] I’ve worked in North America. So confidence, exposure would be one and two. The third thing I would say is that I also gained a bit of a reputation and a track record of having contributed in significant ways at national level, at regional level and to some extent, at the international level. So if I think of in my community, there are things that I would go around the community that I would say yes, when I was involved with this club, this organization, this is what we did and it’s still there in Gros-Islet.

When I was President of the Guild of Undergraduates, I was a huge advocate of students’ rights, and I remember my sister going to university later on and telling me how proud she was that she was called by the librarian simply for the librarian to tell her that the librarian found out that she was my sister and said, “I just found out that Armstrong Alexis is your brother, and I have to tell you, thanks to Armstrong we are in the new library facilities that we are in today” because as the President of the Guild I advocated for the library, [and] I marched to get the library open. So my name is etched in the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Then I came back to Saint Lucia and I worked as Director of Youth and Sports. The Daren Sammy Cricket Ground and the stadium which now houses the Saint Jude Hospital, these were my projects. I worked on those projects. I can look back at those two projects with pride; that I was fundamentally involved in the design of those two projects. I went to Barbados, I went to Haiti after the earthquake [and] within ten days we re-established the operations of UNDP in Haiti. Suriname, I took over an office that had a total program capital budget of $865,000 dollars, if I recall. When I left there I left a $20 million dollar program on the ground, and $20 million dollars in pipeline. So I can go around and find things I did.

I worked in Maiduguri, Nigeria in the heart of Boko Haram Central and established a UNDP office there which is still there. So I can go around the world and I can find things that I have done; that contributed to even if I cannot attribute all of it to myself, but at least I can say that I made those contributions. So that for me is a very fulfilling experience that has come with the exposure; that has come with just sticking to a belief that you can do it and that you have what it takes and that you are prepared to put your shoulder to the wheel to make it happen. So these are some of the things that I think I can talk about in terms of achievements or accomplishments across the board. And I’m hoping that now that I’m with the CARICOM Secretariat before I leave I can also point to a number of areas of success. Although, some of it is already beginning to happen. Maybe it’s just a little too early for me to start talking about them.