Publication:
The Caribbean Connection: Building Digital Jobs in the Caribbean Bit by Bit

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (508.67 KB)
0 downloads
English Text (9.82 KB)
0 downloads
Date
2025-05-06
ISSN
Published
2025-05-06
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Caribbean region faces a growing youth employment challenge, as outdated infrastructure and limited digital skills continue to constrain economic opportunities and resilience. For much of the last decade, dependence on legacy copper networks led to high prices, low bandwidth, and widespread coverage gaps. Schools lacked the internet capacity to serve large student populations, and slow speeds eroded the competitiveness of key industries like tourism. Education systems also rarely emphasize digital competencies as a core outcome. At the same time, emerging IT and IT enabled services (ITES) sectors struggled with underdeveloped broadband infrastructure and a shortage of job-ready talent, limiting the region’s ability to attract investment. Women and young people were particularly affected, with fewer accessible pathways to build digital skills or launch tech-driven enterprises. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the need for reliable connectivity and market-relevant information and communication technology (ICT) training to support remote learning, employment, and entrepreneurship - especially in marginalized groups.
Link to Data Set
Citation
World Bank. 2025. The Caribbean Connection: Building Digital Jobs in the Caribbean Bit by Bit. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43162 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Citations

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Shifting Kenya's Private Sector into Higher Gear
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04-01) World Bank Group
    Shifting Kenya’s private sector into higher gear: a trade and competitiveness agenda’ was born out of the World Bank’s Trade and Competitiveness (T&C) Global Practice recent stock taking of its work in Kenya. This was part of a Programmatic Approach that aimed to organize T&C’s knowledge, advisory, and convening services to address Kenya’s development challenges in the private sector space. By Sub-Saharan African standards, Kenya has a large private sector, which accounts for around 70 percent of total formal employment. As a result, the dynamics of the private sector are a key determinant of the trajectory of the Kenyan economy. The country’s product market regulations a restrictive for domestic competitors and foreign entrants, and the actions of cartels and behavior of dominant firms across sectors undermines competition and hurts consumers. The Kenyan Government recognizes these challenges and has invested significantly in unlocking these bottlenecks with impressive results so far and several important laws passed. Additional efforts to ease regulatory constraints and expedite important legislative changes could improve the investment climate at national and county levels.
  • Publication
    Connecting to Work : How Information and Communication Technologies Could Help Expand Employment Opportunities
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-09) Raja, Siddhartha; Imaizumi, Saori; Kelly, Tim; Narimatsu, Junko; Paradi-Guilford, Cecilia
    Information and communication technology (ICT) has grown as a sector and now employs millions of people worldwide. The proliferation of ICTs has also helped digitize how people find and do work. The world will need to create over 600 million jobs by 2030 for unemployment to remain at current levels. ICT-enabled employment may help address some of this problem both by creating jobs in the ICT sector and by helping to make labor markets more inclusive, innovative, flexible, and transparent. What can governments do to prepare for these changes and maximize employment opportunities? This paper is a first step in an effort by the World Bank to understand how ICTs are shaping, changing, and transforming labor markets. It explores how governments and other stakeholders might respond to leverage the growth of ICTs to help increase employment opportunities. This paper is structured as follows: section 1 serves as an introduction; section 2 defines the scope, focusing on the types of employment opportunities due to ICT as a sector and as a tool; section 3 considers the impact of the ICT sector on software programming, IT services, and telecommunications; section 4 describes how ICTs as tools empower and include more workers in labor markets; section 5 analyzes the challenges and risks that appear alongside these opportunities; section 6 discusses human capital, infrastructure, financial, regulatory, and social systems that will enable ICT in employment; and section 7 identifies strategic themes for governments to consider as they maximize the gains from ICT's increasing role in the world of work.
  • Publication
    School and Work in the Eastern Caribbean : Does the Education System Adequately Prepare Youth for the Global Economy?
    (Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008) Blom, Andreas; Hobbs, Cynthia
    This report comprises the first phase of analytical activities and focuses on the relevance of the education and training systems in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). Its findings confirm the importance of strengthening the link between OECS education and training systems and employers' needs. Analytical findings have also informed the design of a project in St. Lucia to pilot a new market-driven training model requiring close partnership between the public and private sectors. The second phase has already been discussed with the OECS governments and is in the preparation stage. It will develop innovative approaches to expand, diversify and finance nurse training programs to efficiently reduce local shortages within the context of a growing global demand and migration of trained nurses from the Caribbean. The third phase is expected to investigate the factors contributing to learning outcomes, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. The study will inform policies and actions that could lead to improved education quality, which Caribbean stakeholders have identified as fundamental to ensuring a more competitive regional workforce in the longer run. This report's analyses and conclusions confirm many views expressed by government officials, educators, youth, students, teachers, labor union members, private sector representatives, and development partners who participated in two events: (i) the St. Lucia Industry Roundtable for Skills for the Tourism Industry, in November 2005, and (ii) the Caribbean Lifelong Learning Forum in May 2006.1 The report also was reviewed both internally at the World Bank by leading experts in education and training, and externally by OECS stakeholders, including government officials, the Caribbean Examinations Council(CXC), and University of the West Indies.
  • Publication
    Lithuania : Aiming for a Knowledge Economy
    (Washington, DC, 2003-03) World Bank
    Knowledge is increasingly crucial for productivity, competitiveness, and growth. While Lithuania has a well-established culture of valuing knowledge, it is using its knowledge assets-human resources, education systems, researchers and entrepreneurs, and so on-below capacity, and so forgoing opportunities to compete internationally as well as potential growth and income. In recent years Lithuania has made progress in a few areas of the knowledge-based economy, particularly in terms of improving the economic and institutional regime and developing infrastructure for information and communications technology. But less progress has been made on improving education systems, and Lithuania has performed poorly in advancing its systems for innovation. The challenge for Lithuania is to develop new engines of growth and to diversify economic activities. Key to improving competitiveness are the systematic generation, use, and communication of knowledge throughout the economy and society-not just in high-tech sectors but also in areas such as textiles, wood processing, and agribusiness. And not just among the educated elite, but among the general population. The ability to network within and outside Lithuania, supported by Internet access, will become increasingly important to accessing and using knowledge.
  • Publication
    What Matters Most for Teacher Policies : A Framework Paper
    (Washington, DC, 2013-04) World Bank
    Over the past decade, both developed and developing countries have become growingly concerned with how to raise the effectiveness of teachers. The growing focus on the need to strengthen the teaching profession to ensure better education results has encountered the problem that evidence on the policies that raise teaching quality is scattered, incomplete and, in some cases, presents contradictory findings. This paper provides a framework for analyzing teacher policies in education systems around the world in order to support informed education policy decisions. It provides a lens through which governments, World Bank staff, and other interested parties can focus the attention on what the relevant dimensions regarding teacher policies are, what teacher policies seem to matter most to improve student learning, and how to think about prioritization among competing policy options for teacher policy reform. The systems approach for better education results (SABER) - teachers initiative aims to collect, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate comprehensive information on teacher policies across countries around the world. The focus of the paper is the description of the conceptual framework to analyze and assess teacher policies, as well as a review of the evidence base that supports it. The document is organized as follows: section one provides an overview of the general approach, main components, and objectives of the framework, as well as an explanation of the evidence base that supported its development. Section two focuses on the first component of the framework, and describes the categories that are relevant to produce a comprehensive descriptive account of the teacher policies that are in place in a given education system. Section three focuses on policy guidance. Section four concludes presenting an account of how the framework is expected to evolve as new evidence on teacher policies becomes available.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.