Caribbean leaders are collaborating to improve the region’s digital landscape amid claims that the Caribbean is lagging behind the rest of the world where Information and communications technology (ICT) is concerned.

For many countries in the region, the most advanced broadband connection available is 3G — the third generation of wireless mobile telecommunications technology. This, as some countries around the world have started to dabble with 5G technology and beyond.

Deputy programme manager in charge of ICT development at Caricom, Jennifer Britton, says regional leaders are actively working to get the Caribbean up to speed with the rest of the world.

“We are working as a region on a big ambitious project called the Caricom single ICT space. That is supposed to support the harmonisation of some of these fragmented markets and really help us to harmonise on key areas such as spectrum, apps regulation and other things,” said Britton.

While further explaining the Caribbean reality she noted, “one of the issues which have been raised since we worked on the integrated work plan to drive the ICT space is looking at the possibility of a single regulator. At the political level two issues jumped out, one of them was roaming. The political level of the region have pushed and so we’ve actually started to have discussions and negotiations with two main operators in the region and that has resulted in an agreement to reduce roaming rates in the first instance but it is a very significant reduction and so the elimination part of it should not be hard to come to use in about the next 18 months.”

The St George’s declaration on roaming, which was signed with two of the telecommunication providers in the Caribbean, is expected to be implemented between the second and third quarter of this year, giving consideration to the technical aspects of the implementation and the public awareness campaigns that must take place.

Grenada’s Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell, who has lead responsibility for science and technology within Caricom, said the road map for the Caricom Single ICT Space was approved by regional leaders at their summit in 2017 and it was envisaged that early adoption by governments would lead to accelerated and widespread use of ICT across all sectors.

At the same time, Britton contends that there’s still a lot of work to be done in building out an effective ICT ecosystem within the region.

“We still continue to have fragmented ICT markets, some of them with very complex regulatory structures. We have countries with about two to six different regulators regulating different issues in the space. Not a negative, we had to build out as we saw the market but now there is room and time for those regulatory bodies to be consolidated and work on more collaborative regulation,” she noted.

“Our relationship with data, information and the obvious fallout into things like research and innovation is not as mature as it should be and that is one of the things which will have to come up to speed very quickly if we are going to be able to take ourselves seriously as a region and move forward into this brave new world as valued players,” Britton continued.

Caricom has declared ICT as a priority and this is reflected in the objectives identified in the technological resilience pillar of the Caricom Regional Strategic Plan 2015-2019.

In the meantime, Britton urged that “we have to accelerate 4G and 5G deployment, if we are going to be able to treat with the new technologies. We have to be able to accelerate that deployment to meet with the demand and the current leads. We also need a new approach to innovation because in some instances over and under regulation by governments have caused unnecessary red tape and had the potential of stifling innovation. I’m not sure we’ve been able to measure that very well yet in the region but it has been reported in other parts of the world,”

ICT for development (ICT4D) or digital development, as it is now termed, combines the ICT sector and initiatives with the social, environmental, economic and political objectives to fast-track international, regional and national initiatives.

ICT4D covers numerous areas, including ICT applications, cyber security, e-commerce, e-education, e-government, e-health, open source software, policy development, statistics, youth and e-waste.