The Barbados-based Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export) Wednesday launched its flagship investment platform with a senior Barbados government minister underscoring the importance of foreign direct investment into the region.
Senior Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Christopher Sinckler, said that the Caribbean Investment Forum (CIF 2026) to be held here, October 5-7, has over the past five years built a strong and credible space for investors and for those entrepreneurs who take the time, the effort and spend the resources to innovate and bring good project ideas to the fore.
He said that from its inception in Trinidad and Tobago, through the rapid growth in the Bahamas and Guyana and to the expansive presentation in Montego Bay, Jamaica last year, the CIF ‘has really now firmly established itself as the region’s premier investment forum, bringing ideas to capital and intent to investments’. Caribbean Export said that the event to be held under the theme ‘Invest. Innovate. Accelerate’ is unlike traditional investment conferences and is designed as an investment facilitation platform that moves beyond dialogue to action by connecting investors directly with prepared projects, regional decision-makers and strategic financing partners.
Caribbean Export chairperson Dr. Lynette Holder, describes the CIF as an important milestone in strengthening the Caribbean’s investment ecosystem.
‘The Caribbean possesses tremendous opportunity, innovation and resilience. CIF 2026 represents our collective commitment to transforming opportunity into investment and partnerships that deliver sustainable economic growth across our region,’ Holder said.
Sinckler said that the CIF represents an opportunity for making a ‘clear proposition to global capital that the region is not only open for business but ready to surge returns on investments while intensifying transformative developments for all of the countries.
‘Our reality in the Caribbean is that we are often viewed as just a collection of small vulnerable markets sitting on the peripheries of the global economies waiting for some small slice of global development to pass our way.
‘The truth is that nothing could be further from the truth. Our region, ladies and gentlemen, is a stable, connected and increasingly innovative geopolitical and economic space that offers commercially sound opportunities in global priorities such as food security, clean energy, digital solutions, climate resilience and modern logistics.’
Sinckler told the launch that the Caribbean must present such an environment today and always given that investors are savvy who naturally prioritise returns on their investment.
‘We know that too. But they are also pressing for clarity, transparency on whether economies are sound and their political environments within which they operate are stable. They seek predictable policies, speedy approvals of projects from inception to execution, adequately skilled and flexible labour forces and the scaling of businesses beyond a simple national market.
‘These are key areas of interest to investors. Our responsibility, therefore, is to ensure that these characteristics which define our national and regional business space are known and marketed to those who are looking for solid investment opportunities.’
He said that a recent United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report showed that global capital, that is foreign direct investment, rose by six per cent to US$1.6 trillion last year.
However, flows to developing countries, including in the region, only grew by two per cent.
‘So this shows that capital is moving, but selectively to jurisdictions that are prepared, credible, and able to execute,’ Sinckler said, noting that he spent at least two years working with the Inter American Developmen Bank (IDB) in establishing a project preparation coordination mechanism to do exactly that for the Caribbean.
He said that there’s work to be done to secure a larger proportion of foreign direct investment and local investment as well,’ he said, adding that the Caribbean possess a number of advantages.
‘Established democracies, respect for the rule of law, well-educated citizenry, for a more strategic geographic …allows us to maintain deep ties with Europe, the Americas, and even now building stronger links with Africa and the wider global South.
‘But in order to fully cash in, as it were…we must be prepared to position ourselves at the cutting edge of knowledge, information, technology, and institutional flexibility. Deepening our knowledge of what investors want, how markets work is going to be essential to repositioning ourselves to pray open investment books nationally, regionally, and globally as well.
‘It means that our planning and policy making in both public and private sectors must be punctilious, must be increasingly evidence-based, data-driven, and empirical to the core. If we cannot empirically say what is happening, why it is happening, and more importantly, how to make something happen, we will always fall short of the promise and compromise on our expectation.’
Sinckler said that this means that the region must not only acquire the latest and best technologies, including artifical intelligence (AI) ‘but we must be prepared to train our human resources across the region to mobilise and use that technology to drive innovation, expedite implementation, and increase inclusivity in policy making and planning’
He warned that it is unlikely that these interventions will materialise if countries in the region as a whole, institutional flexibility does not become a core part of how they do business and how they engage people.
He suggested that rigid institutional systems in the region may very well be one of the most constraining features of the investment grid across the region, adding ‘I think we all know that many of our countries, Barbados included to some extent, have been tackling this issue of, quote-unquote, the ease of doing business for decades now with varying levels of success’.
But he lamented despite the successes notwithstanding, national laws, institutional architectures, and operational procedures across the region in public and private sectors, ‘are still too rigid and lacking flexibility.
‘Whether it is in customs procedure and port facilitation, tax policy, transportation, banking, and access to finance…increasingly, as we have seen, some labour market rigidities or lack of flexibilities relative to accessing certain skills across the region, we continue to, use another bad cliche, shoot ourselves in the foot.
‘And so, we cannot leverage our natural and our policy-created advantages if we fail to harness and unleash the hidden capacity and variety to which many this morning have mentioned and which you know exist in this region.’
Sinckler said that enough emphasis cannot be placed on the Caribbean regional market as a market for consumption and investment that can grow our economies and position the region to be world competitors.
‘Our investment proposition must include not only what can be built in the Caribbean, but the assets that Caribbean people can use to build things for the world, whether tangible or intangible, as we all can be not just consumers, but producers as well.
‘This region is not a series of disconnected jurisdictions, but one investment space, one in which capital, skills, goods and services are more relatively effectively a space in which we can create partnerships using platforms such as the Caribbean Investment Forum, as we have seen.’
He said Barbados is ready not because ‘we say we are ready..(but) because we have done the heavy lifting, and continue to do the heavy lifting in the past few years on rebuilding the foundations of our economy, and on which investment depends.
‘We have restored economic stability. We have strengthened our institutions. We have modernised our legislation and continue to do so. We are modernising infrastructure, including fast tracking, cutting edge digital technology, and technological investments that will allow us to become data sovereign, while accelerating the capacity for moving capital, goods, services, and information, as well as ideas, to more efficient and effective ways.’
Caribbean Export said that the launch signals the beginning of an ambitious international campaign designed to position the Caribbean as a competitive destination for sustainable investment while strengthening collaboration between governments, investors, development finance institutions and the private sector.
It will bring together international investors, policymakers, entrepreneurs, project developers, financial institutions and strategic partners to explore investment-ready opportunities across four transformational sectors, namely technology and digital transformation, logistics and transportation, agribusiness and food security as well as the green economy transition.
‘This forum is about bringing together the right people, the right projects and the right capital. We want investors to leave Barbados with qualified opportunities, meaningful partnerships and a clear pathway towards investment,’ said Caribbean Export’s executive director Dr. Damie Sinanan.