Editorial | CARICOM’s single ICT space

At a conference in Miami in December on digital connectivity, Dickon Mitchell, the outgoing chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), outlined a raft of initiatives planned by CARICOM to enhance the use of digital technologies to support the region’s development.

“The digital revolution presents a golden opportunity,” Mr Mitchell told the conference.

He added: “Technology doesn’t just connect us – it empowers us. It allows us to innovate, collaborate, and overcome the constraints of geography and size.”

Among the ideas Mr Mitchell mentioned was a CARICOM digital skills fund “which will support a wide range of training initiatives across the region”, as well as an e-payment platform to enable “seamless cross-border transactions” that would “foster trade, enhance efficiency, and reduce dependence on external financial networks”.

CARICOM was also collaborating on cybersecurity, through its Implementation Agency for Crime and Security.

A regional response/approach to the harnessing, and regulation, of artificial intelligence is also in the community’s agenda, and Mr Mitchell disclosed that he had proposed that CARICOM convene a round-table discussion on the subject this year.

ABSENCE OF CENTRAL FRAMEWORK

This newspaper welcomes these and other projects highlighted by the Grenadian leader. Indeed, taken together, they seem a credible platform from which CARICOM countries can expand, and accelerate, their participation in an increasingly digitally driven global economy.

The Gleaner’s concern, however, is the seeming absence of a central framework in which the initiatives are anchored.

In that regard, the projects could possibly collide with different regulatory regimes in each member state, making them – as is too often the case with CARICOM’s initiatives – difficult to implement. In those situations, even promising ideas tend to atrophy and die.

CARICOM has pretensions of transforming itself into a genuine single market and economy. It has done substantial work on this front, notwithstanding its notorious shortcomings in implementing its decisions.

However, the rapid growth of digital technology, particularly over the last decade, is transforming the way business is conducted, thus demanding new regimes to accommodate the changes.

It is in this context that a decade ago, in 2014, that CARICOM’s leaders identified the need to create a single information and communications technology (ICT) space within the community. Effectively, a new ICT regime would mirror the intent and ambitions of the single market and economy. Put another way, CARICOM, in advancing the single ICT space, would harmonise “ICT policies, legislation, regulations, technical standards, best practices, networks and services”.

A work plan was crafted by technical experts in 2017. Much of the agenda was to be accomplished by 2025. The implementation cost was estimated at US$45 million.

GREATER OPPORTUNITIES

The opportunity for CARICOM to start “anew to create a new single market and the digital economy” was noted in a 2021 report by a task force, chaired by Barbadian economist Avinash Persaud, on how the community might lift itself out of its economic crisis.

Among the recommendations of the Persaud task force was for workers in one CARICOM country to be able to have “a digital employment contract in another member state without requiring a work permit”.

Among other things, the task force called for “mutual recognition agreements or common minimum standards to remove all artificial barriers against the free movement within the community of digital services”.

But the Persaud report, however, noted that operating in this new digital space would require the ability to cost-effectively transmit large amounts of data between member states.

Indeed, there have been separate discussions between Caribbean governments and regional telecoms providers on lowering the cost of telecommunications services, including removing roaming charges on mobile telephones. Although roaming charges have been lowered, critics say that overall progress in this area has been slow and insufficient.

With respect to the broader regulatory areas where governments hold primary sway, while the work continues, it is this newspaper’s sense that it has been slow. Moreover, regional governments have not communicated effectively with regional citizens and the private sector on the concepts of a single ICT space and the potential benefits thereof.

In his Miami speech, Mitchell did not place the initiatives he outlined within the context of the proposed ICT space. Neither did he offer an update on the legislative and policy coordination efforts on that front.

Individual countries, of course, have been pushing ICT/digital technology projects in efforts to transform their economies. That is good.

We, however, agree with the Persaud task force that there are greater opportunities in collaboration, using all the skills within CARICOM in a single ICT space. Which means that regional governments should accelerate their efforts to get it going.