Dear Editor,

Jamaica has approximately 72,000 business establishments. That figure comes from the 2018 Jamaica Survey of Establishments, which is the first nationally representative survey of the country’s business sector, conducted by Statistical Instititue of Jamaica and Planning Institute of Jamaica with World Bank funding. It surveyed 35,287 establishments with three or more employees and identified a further approximately 37,900 micro businesses below that threshold.

Its primary finding: Access to financing is the defining structural challenge of Jamaica’s private sector. Most of these 72,000 businesses operate in cash, largely outside the formal financial system, without digital payment infrastructure or the management capacity to scale. They are the distribution and retail backbone of Jamaica’s economy as well as an untapped pathway for the workers whose jobs are projected to disappear because of AI-driven displacement.

The 56,695 Jamaican workers identified by University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) researcher Professor Paul Golding as facing high automation exposure are not a uniform group and therefore require two distinct responses.

The UTech research confirms that AI-enabled automation disproportionately threatens female-dominated occupations including clerical roles and call centre work. The business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in Jamaica was built substantially on the labour of young Jamaican women, and it is this population that faces the most immediate displacement. For displaced women with secondary school qualifications and customer service experience, the viable near-term pathways are agroprocessing, greenhouse farming under the ADAPT Jamaica programme, tourism-related enterprise, food preparation and hospitality — sectors in which customer service formation and digital literacy are genuine productive assets, where women already operate with confidence, and where Jamaica’s documented growth in tourism and food security investment creates real and growing demand.

These are not fallback options. They are sectors that the Jamaica Government and development institutions are actively investing in, and they require exactly the formation that displaced BPO workers already hold.

Here is where the 72,000 businesses become relevant. These enterprises are operating below their productive potential precisely because they lack what displaced BPO and clerical workers carry — customer service experience, digital literacy, administrative discipline, and supervisory capability. The pathway is employment within these businesses in a management or operational capacity, partnership arrangements in which the worker’s formation complements the owner’s market knowledge, or gradual acquisition if the owner is willing and ready to exit.

JAM-DEX — the Bank of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency — creates the enabling condition for this pathway. Every JAM-DEX transaction builds a verifiable digital financial record for a business that currently operates in cash and is invisible to the formal credit system. That record is the foundation on which licensed lenders can extend credit. The displaced worker brings the management formation while the existing owner retains their ownership position. This enterprise participation pathway is a complement to the retraining programme — not a substitute for it. Both are required.

The BPO worker who built a professional identity, “I work in financial services,” “I work in technology,” faces a psychological and social cost in transitioning to agricultural or trades employment that the retraining statistics will not capture. Studies of communities that have experienced structural displacement, including Jamaica’s own BPO sector during the COVID-19 contraction, document that the loss of occupational identity can be as disruptive as income loss. Generally, workers withdraw from the labour market rather than accept work perceived as lower status, even when the financial return is comparable or better.

This is not a character failing, it is a predictable response to a hierarchy of work encoded into Jamaica’s social systems over generations — one in which office work is “professional” and agricultural or trades work is a fallback. Dismantling it requires national leadership visibly revaluing these careers as dignified, technologically savvy, and economically competitive. It requires retraining programmes designed to rebuild professional identity, not only transfer technical skills, and it requires the student entering school today to graduate in 2034 into a labour market where these pathways are already normalised.

The transition is more demanding than any single programme can address and more possible than the current policy conversation suggests.

Donald O Charles

managing.director.wocapfund@gmail.com