Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

“We will not sit by and hope for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ‘to hap­pen’. We will not sit by and hope for in­vest­ment to come in­to T&T. We will work hard, and we will work tire­less­ly to make these a re­al­i­ty.”

This was the state­ment made by Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the Amer­i­ca Cham­ber of Com­merce T&T Ni­rad Tewarie yes­ter­day as he de­liv­ered the open­ing re­marks in for the vir­tu­al con­fer­ence launch for the Tech Hub Is­lands Sum­mit (t.h.i.s.).

“Along the way, we might stum­ble, but we will get back up. We will hold the hands of our part­ners as we hope they will hold ours. We will find the in­no­va­tors. We will en­able them. And one day soon, we will be able to say that t.h.i.s hap­pened. T.h.i.s is T&T—a glob­al tech­nol­o­gy hub,” Tewarie said.

This year is the third edi­tion of t.h.i.s.

In 2019, when t.h.i.s. was launched it ex­ceed­ed ex­pec­ta­tions with more than 300 peo­ple at­tend­ing, Tewarie said.

“At the time we thought we were catalysing the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion dis­cus­sion, but lit­tle did we know the dis­cus­sion would be catal­ysed even fur­ther and faster by the events of 2020,” he said.

Tewarie said AM­CHAM T&T will be the cat­a­lyst for mak­ing this coun­try a glob­al tech hub.

“We will forge the part­ner­ships to en­able us to achieve this goal and we will work tire­less­ly, cre­ative­ly, and me­thod­i­cal­ly to make this goal a re­al­i­ty,” he said.

Tewarie ar­gued the jour­ney would be eas­i­er if both the pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tors were trans­form­ing to­geth­er.

“So, we wel­come the work be­ing done at the Gov­ern­ment lev­el, in par­tic­u­lar through the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion and through agen­cies such as the TTIFC and iGovTT,” he said.

The theme for this year’s event is “Now and Be­yond.”

“At this year’s Con­fer­ence, the sto­ry we are telling is not about be­com­ing com­pla­cent with what seems to work now. In­stead, we must con­sis­tent­ly and con­stant­ly look ahead so that we are al­ways chas­ing our dreams, while those dreams hur­tle us to a brighter fu­ture,” he said.