Belize needs builders, not beggars: Why a new mindset is urgent

Published by [email protected] at April 27, 2025

Posted: Sunday, April 27, 2025. 10:54 am CST.

By Horace Palacio: For too long, Belize has been stuck in a dangerous cycle of dependency. Grants, foreign aid, and international assistance have become the crutches on which we lean far too heavily. Every budget shortfall, every infrastructure project, every public service seems to wait on the next check from abroad. It is time to ask ourselves: when will we decide that enough is enough?

An economy that relies on handouts is not a real economy. It is a fragile system, forever at the mercy of shifting donor priorities and global politics. Belize has natural resources, strategic geographic advantages, and an increasingly educated population. Yet we continue to act like a nation incapable of creating wealth for itself. This mindset must end.

Foreign aid and grants are useful in moments of emergency, but they cannot and must not be the foundation of national development. True development comes from within. It comes from building a strong, diversified economy with pillars like agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, and digital services leading the way. Countries that made the leap from poverty to prosperity — think of Singapore, South Korea, and Estonia — did so not by waiting for handouts but by investing in education, infrastructure, private enterprise, and technology.

Belize must now choose the harder but more rewarding path. We must lower barriers to business creation, reform our outdated tax systems, invest aggressively in infrastructure and logistics, and empower Belizeans to innovate and create. Instead of sending young people abroad for opportunity, we must create opportunity at home.

Economic sovereignty is real sovereignty. Political independence without economic muscle is a façade. If we want to chart our own course as a nation — free from the influence of foreign governments, international agencies, and shifting global interests — then we must have an economy that can fund our ambitions, pay our debts, and lift our people without begging bowls.

Belize has the tools. What it needs now is the will. A new mindset must take root: one of ownership, one of pride in hard work, one of belief that Belizeans can build a future just as great, if not greater, than any aid package could ever deliver.

The future belongs to those willing to build it. It’s time for Belize to build.

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