At the 49th Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) this week, veteran St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves urged the Caribbean to “learn from Jamaica”, with respect to its use of advanced forensic scientific tools.

Guyana President Irfaan Ali, in addition to expanding on Gonsalves’ comments on crime and security — arguing for a four-pronged approach of infrastructure, legislative reform, judicial efficiency, and border protection through technology — also emphasised the need to complete the transition to the free movement of people in the “single market and economy”, address climate change, and achieve unity on the reparation issue.

There are signs of new urgency in Caricom this year. President Ali specifically noted the work of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley in driving the free movement of people forward, and Prime Minister Holness’s focus on gangs is particularly timely, with the concrete example of Haiti as a failed State right next to us. Inviting Interpol, while simultaneously showcasing the technology of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), is the kind of innovative example sorely needed in the region.

However, it is still sobering to think that ‘A Time for Action’ is the title of an over-30-year-old Caricom report (as well as being a key theme of Afrexim Bank’s conference in The Bahamas last year). That report was at least partly driven by the then example of the European Union, which, over the last few decades, actually did much of the integration the Caribbean report was supposed to achieve in our region. Moreover, Europe thinks it still has far to go, causing the chairwoman of one of Europe’s largest banks, Banco Santander (which has a big regional presence in Latin America), to describe the new US Administration as the “alarm clock” Europe needed. If this is true for mighty Europe, it is many more times the case for our small region.

There are countless areas in need of focused attention from Caricom, but I would argue the first priority for a new underlying regional strategy should be “Giving First” to create a virtual Caribbean Sea. Allow me to explain.

Caricom needs to take a Usain Bolt type-approach to getting things done through the regional implementation of digital technology, simultaneously moving away from our transactional mindset and embracing a true innovation. A recent talk by tech entrepreneur and author Brad Feld, structured as an interview with fellow tech entrepreneur Martin Babinec, provides a good example of what is needed. Essentially, he says, in creating a technology innovation system, one needs to be willing to put energy into the system without knowing what you will get back. It is fundamentally different from paying it forward, which is “defined as somebody did something for you so you did something for them”. Another way of looking at this more widely would be the African word “Ubuntu”.

This give-before-you-get ethos suggested here should guide future Caricom negotiations, which needs to abandon its zero-sum thinking and get on with the job of regional integration. Even for one of my favourite “lucky” countries, The Bahamas, the alarm clock is finally ringing loudly, and hopefully it may have woken it up to the fact that it is not American and now needs to become a true part of Caricom, and quickly.

The key objective should be to start by creating a virtual Caribbean technology and innovation ecosystem which reaches back to our global diaspora, particularly our entrepreneurs and professionals. One of the problems of Caribbean integration has always been that our logistics are poor (a real sea divides us). But those of us who have lived abroad understand how Caribbean people immediately become one in the metropoles of New York, London, and Toronto, as opposed to our “crabs in a barrel” attitude when we return to our own countries.

As covered in a previous Jamaica Observer article ‘Caribbean needs its own economic independence day”, published on June 4, Barbados seems to have gained regional first-mover advantage with Prime Minister Mottley’s Future Barbados prototyping strategy. This creates a platform to incubate new ideas by bringing together young, smart local talent with older experience, public institutions, and global collaborators. The most recent collaboration is FutureHEALTH, launched at the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management to reimagine the health-care tech ecosystem. In the words of Future Barbados Director Tamaisha Eytle-Harvey, the mission is “to turn bold ideas into real-world health-care solutions” and position “Barbados as a global leader in health innovation”.

While the idea of Barbados acting almost as a regulatory “sandbox” for an early “prototype” may be a good one, Jamaica, with 10 times the population, would be a good place to achieve initial scale for these “seed-type” investments and should seek to act as force multiplier and not competitor. The use of venture capital terminology is deliberate, as a case study should be done on the lessons learned from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)-funded Jamaica Venture Capital Project (JVCP) here, which took place within the Development Bank of Jamaica, as it has a great deal of relevance to Caricom as a possible way forward for other regional development banks (see also my June 18 Observer article ‘Revisiting the dreams of my father’).

As an aside, hopefully, Jamaica taking over chairmanship of Caricom means that it will sign up to Afreximbank Bank’s sixth region initiative, thereby potentially doubling the funding available to the region from this source to US$3 billion and making it available to the Jamaican private sector. Afrexim’s public-private partnership model, which, among many other things, gives it global investment-grade status in a bad neighbourhood, is noteworthy in creating financial markets that actually fund entrepreneurs in the very difficult macroeconomic circumstances of Africa.

The Caribbean has seen home-grown unicorns (US$1-billion market capitalisation companies) created from scratch (Sandals and Digicel come to mind in Jamaica). However, “my best boss ever”, Gordon “Butch” Stewart, who would have celebrated his 84th birthday on July 6, is the only such founder of a regional private sector business based on tourism exports as opposed to internal demand.

Along with internal free movement of labour, Caricom should push a regional “Digital Nomad” strategy, currently best executed by Barbados, thereby catalysing a “Silicon Caribbean Sea” of global (through long-stay visas) and regional tech talent focused on solving regional problems with the scalability to solve global problems and thereby become global unicorns.

Keith Collister