If drive and energy are key qualities for the head of a small country’s overseas promotion agency, then Patricia Francis is ideally suited to her job. This tough Jamaican says her job involves constant battles to reverse false perceptions of her island paradise. “Telling investors that you can do something here other than tourism was the challenge,” is her constant theme.

Ms Francis, president of Jamaica Promotions Organisation (Jampro), Jamaica’s export and investment agency, knows much about the industrial side of the island as well as its beauty. She was born in Kingston and went to university in Miami before returning, in 1980 to a job at a Jamaican management consultancy, Project Development Services. This gave her wide experience of the Jamaican industrial landscape, in particular tourism and manufacturing.

She was offered the presidency of Jampro in 1995, when the organisation was performing poorly. She thought she could turn it round with ease. She says: “That was private sector confidence. I quickly discovered what a hard task I had set myself.” JamPro was heavily bureaucratic and imbued with public sector values. Instituting a private sector ethic has been her long-term mission, and one she accepts has yet to be completely fulfiled. She says: “Turnrounds are dynamic they are never completed.

“My mission is to make people more receptive to the idea of foreign-controlled companies operating in this country. I have to deal with the sentimental view that large-scale infrastructure projects have to remain in the public domain. This is a constant battle and it involves educating people, locally as well as abroad.”

Ms Francis has two years left of her contract, and then she plans to rejoin the private sector. As she looks back on her six years at the helm of Jampro, she says her greatest achievement was overseeing an organisation responsible for increasing FDI investment from $20m to $150m. That should win her private sector plaudits and see her land a plum corporate job.