Resh­ma Ra­goonath

The Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute's (Cariri) Cen­tre for En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment (CED) se­cured a $US3.5 mil­lion World Bank project to es­tab­lish a Re­gion­al Cli­mate In­no­va­tion Cen­tre for the Caribbean even be­fore the doors to its spank­ing new $15 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty were for­mal­ly opened on Wednes­day.

Plan­ning and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie an­nounced the project as he for­mal­ly com­mis­sioned the CED build­ing at In­no­va­tion Dri­ve, Freeport.He de­scribed the fa­cil­i­ty as a piv­otal step to­wards the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my.Tewarie said Cariri suc­cess­ful­ly ne­go­ti­at­ed with the World Bank to es­tab­lish a re­gion­al cli­mate cen­tre to be lo­cat­ed at the CED build­ing.

"This is be­ing un­der­tak­en with the Sci­en­tif­ic Re­search Coun­cil of Ja­maica as a col­lab­o­ra­tive ven­ture and the project val­ue is $3.5 mil­lion over five years. This project will for­mal­ly launch in four to eight weeks," he said.He said the project was im­por­tant since it would bring re­search and knowl­edge of cli­mate change and re­lat­ed mat­ters to­geth­er in an imag­i­na­tive ap­proach to prob­lems "which will yield in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions and ac­tu­al in­no­va­tions."

Tewarie said the con­cept be­hind the CED was to cre­ate a fa­cil­i­ty "that can be­come a sus­tain­able in­fra­struc­ture for the cre­ation of new busi­ness­es."He said the CED would pro­vide an av­enue for de­vel­op­ment of the cre­ative and in­no­va­tion in­dus­tries and of­fer busi­ness­es with­in those in­dus­tries a fa­cil­i­ty to grow their ideas.

"The CED is not just a build­ing. It rep­re­sents gov­ern­ment's com­mit­ment to en­gen­der­ing and en­cour­ag­ing en­ter­prise and in­no­va­tion. And en­ter­prise must be the dri­ving force for gen­er­at­ing high­er lev­els of eco­nom­ic growth," he said.

The fa­cil­i­ty has four build­ings–a busi­ness in­cu­ba­tor, a tech­nol­o­gy in­cu­ba­tor which hous­es a ro­bot­ics lab, an M cen­tre for soft­ware de­vel­op­ment and an In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT)/Tech­ma­nia cen­tre. There are al­ready en­tre­pre­neur ten­ants us­ing the fa­cil­i­ty for their in­ter­net-based op­er­a­tions.Cariri CEO Li­aquat Ali Shah said the CED was the fruition of a dream to have a fa­cil­i­ty to en­cour­age in­no­va­tion, in­ven­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty.

He said soft­ware gi­ant Mi­crosoft and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider Dig­i­cel have part­nered with the M cen­tre where ap­pli­ca­tions for com­put­ers and smart­phones will be de­vel­oped.