In its dri­ve to build tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pa­bil­i­ty and en­hance the op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy of small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es (SMEs), the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (CARIRI) re­cent­ly host­ed an In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) Aware­ness fo­rum, for busi­ness­es in Cen­tral Trinidad. The event, at­tend­ed by de­ci­sion-mak­ers of SMEs in the food and bev­er­age, and the plas­tics, print­ing and pack­ag­ing in­dus­tries-the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ries of this ini­tia­tive, is fi­nan­cial­ly sup­port­ed by the Mul­ti­lat­er­al In­vest­ment Fund of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment BanK (IDB).

In his open­ing re­marks, CARIRI chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Li­aquat Ali Shah stat­ed that this project is in keep­ing with Gov­ern­ment's des­ig­na­tion of ICT as a strate­gic pil­lar for sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment; his In­sti­tute has there­fore ac­cord­ed pri­or­i­ty to this area, as a spring­board for in­dus­tri­al growth and de­vel­op­ment. En­ti­tled SMEs and Com­pet­i­tive­ness, the fea­ture pre­sen­ta­tion by Quin­ten Ques­tel, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Lim­it­ed, en­cour­aged par­tic­i­pants to em­brace the use of ICT to de­vel­op the com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage. Two en­tre­pre­neurs-David Thomas, MD of Mar­ket Movers and Al­don Moore, MD of G-net Sys­tems Lim­it­ed-shared ex­pe­ri­ences with par­tic­i­pants on how ICT has pos­i­tive­ly im­pact­ed their busi­ness­es.

CARIRI sys­tems an­a­lyst, Hay­den Charles said that the ICT-SME project will be ex­e­cut­ed in three phas­es. Fol­low­ing aware­ness-build­ing ses­sions in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the In­sti­tute will en­gage in di­ag­nos­tics scop­ing stud­ies in which busi­ness au­dits will be con­duct­ed at no cost to the par­tic­i­pat­ing en­ter­pris­es. In its fi­nal phase, the ICT in­ter­ven­tion pro­gramme best suit­ed to each SME would be pro­posed/im­ple­ment­ed. Both the IDB and CARIRI un­der­stand the sig­nif­i­cant role of SMEs to the de­vel­op­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go. Out­side of the En­er­gy sec­tor, they con­sti­tute the main­stay of our eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.