Small and medium business leaders to meet in St Lucia
CASTRIES, St Lucia – Entrepreneurs, owners, operators and managers of small to medium firms from across the region will meet here from Wednesday to adopt a strategy aimed at strengthening entrepreneurship and boost job creation across 14 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries.
The three-day Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development Workshop and Business Incubator Management (BIM) Training forms part of a series of training sessions, designed to build an integrated ecosystem of support for early-stage entrepreneurs in the region.
The workshop is part of the Accelerate Caribbean regional incubation support programme designed by the World Bank Group, InfoDev, to strengthen innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation across CARICOM.
The workshop will bring together incubator managers, entrepreneurs, academics, government officials, the media, donors and investors.
Team Leader of Accelerate Caribbean, Natalia Pipia, said the “Caribbean demonstrates a natural inclination towards innovation and entrepreneurship.
“People here work hard to build products, design new technology and offer services very attractive to even overseas markets, yet so many small businesses do not survive more than a few years,” she noted.
Pipia said Accelerate Caribbean is offering training in incubation management to qualified professionals and business support companies in the Eastern Caribbean “to mitigate against this low business survival rate, which is critical to job creation and development in the region”.
The highlight of the workshop will be a panel discussion on “Building a Strong Interconnected Start-up Community in St Lucia”.
Panelists will discuss a collaborative approach to building a sustainable ecosystem for entrepreneurship and innovation in St Lucia. Participants will discuss principles and good practices of business incubation, business incubator models, as well as components of a successful incubator.
Following the workshop, the Accelerate Caribbean team will deliver a Business Incubation Management (BIM) Training on October 15 & 16.
