Programme Coordinator Consultant

The Caribbean continues to face several challenges that impacts the livelihoods of its citizens, including very low rates of economic growth, exacerbated by its inability to recover from the pandemic and other external shocks, and the vulnerability of the region to the impacts of climate change.
An analysis of the very slow long-term growth trend of the Caribbean countries since the 1990s has identified low Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth as a key explanatory variable. Globally, TFP accounts for most of the growth differences across countries. The main driver of long-term TFP growth at the economy level is business innovation, including the creation or adoption of technology, leading to higher value-added activities, products, and processes, and improving the performance of existing ones, thus increasing labor productivity at the firm level. Caribbean businesses invest significantly less in innovation in products and services than those of other small world economies, and this difference is concentrated in Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs).
Simultaneously, climate change is already generating global changes in average temperatures, extreme heat waves, droughts, changes in rainfall patterns, duration, and intensity, sea level rise, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increase in both the frequency and potency of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic. In the Caribbean region, average annual loss from tropical cyclones is estimated at US$835 million, while in the Pacific this number is US$178 million. In addition to natural disasters, the region is already experiencing other aspects of climate change, such as an increase in heat stress, extreme rainfall and flash flooding, dry spells and drought, sea level rise and changes in ocean temperature and salinity, all of which threaten economic activity and livelihoods, especially of the most vulnerable.
In this context, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), are co-financing a program called “The Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (CCPF). CCPF is executed by the Inter-American Development Bank, through a Facility Coordination Unit based in the IDB’s Barbados Country Office. The facility’s objective is to support the region in increasing productivity and Caribbean firms’ contribution to economic growth. The Facility executes this mandate through two pillars:

Specifically, Pillar I of the Facility focuses on: (i) supporting and scaling up catalytic projects that could have a significant demonstrative effect on existing or new sectors, at the individual and collective level; (ii) supporting firms and groups of firms to develop innovative products, processes or services that will make them more competitive and generate sustained employment; (iii) supporting the competitiveness of firms by strengthening technology extension and innovation support services in institutions that promote Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME); (iv) institutional strengthening and capacity building to organizations in charge of promoting clusters, value-chains, entrepreneurship, innovation funds and technology extension services with a proactive focus in small and vulnerable countries; (v) support for the implementation of Cluster Competitiveness Improvement Plans for clusters and value chains and technological extension services; and (vi) supporting projects to increase the bankability, investment readiness and access to long term capital for potential projects and projects that promote collaboration among financial ecosystem actors, including key financial institutions in the region, venture capitalists, private equity funds, commercial banks and high impact investment funds to facilitate access to finance for SMEs. In addition, this pillar supports: (i) cluster and firm level data and knowledge generation activities; and (ii) dissemination activities.

By September 2023, CCPF had approved and committed 100% of its available resources (US$27.3 million) and disbursed 80% of them across 56 projects in all 13 beneficiary countries, meeting and/or surpassing most of its output and outcome indicators. Under Pillar 1, it had improved the capacity and willingness of 673 businesses to collectively address specific private sector challenges and opportunities via clustering, it had increased innovation and technology adoption in 809 businesses, it had improved the technical capacity of 110 business support organizations to stimulate productivity and innovation in firms, and 504 of treated businesses had introduced innovations.                                                                                                                                   
Further, the IDB is in the process of mobilizing a new programme, Compete Caribbean + (CC+), with the objective to mainstream climate action in the Caribbean private sector, while increasing Caribbean businesses’ contribution to economic growth in ways that expand employment and inclusion opportunities for vulnerable groups. CC+ will consist of three pillars: