Caribbean
June 12, 2023 — The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) has identified two Member States – Dominica and Grenada – to stage Recycle OECS model demonstration projects. The two countries met the eligibility criteria and were deemed most ready and viable for that purpose. The disclosure was made by Mr. Chamberlain Emmanuel, Head of the OECS Environmental Sustainability Division, during the unveiling of the Recycle OECS Project on June 7, the eve of World Ocean’s Day.
The project is aimed at reducing plastic pollution in the OECS. The key outputs are the design and implementation of a model for sustainable waste separation, collection, and recycling of plastic waste for the OECS. An important aspect of the model is that it will consider a regional approach, self-financing, sustainability, and business viability.
Mr. Emmanuel said that the theme for World Ocean Day -“Planet Ocean: Tides are Changing,” resonates with the circumstances and vision of the OECS, which contains an ocean space that is 85 times larger than its land space. For the region’s natural resource-dependent economies, these circumstances call for sustainable approaches that are blue, green, and circular to address the threat of pollution. “In so doing, the Recycle OECS Project is advancing the strides of the region to position our perspectives and prospects toward the vision of A Model Blue Economy Region.” He observed that the region is “littered with plans – vision plans, strategic plans, and action plans, but there is a wide lag in implementation,” and challenged Member States to “change the tides and get it done”.
Country representatives from Dominica and Grenada indicated that they are keen to accept the offer to stage demonstration projects. Speaking on behalf of the Grenada Solid Waste Management Authority, Senior Public Relations Officer Myrna Julien said, the opportunity is timely for Grenada.
“We are at the crossroads of changing the way we manage waste, with plans to focus greater attention on waste diversion, both as a means of encouraging businesses to be born out of waste, while cutting back on waste going to the landfills, and for addressing the countless environmental and public health challenges that have emerged from improper disposal of waste, ” She added that Grenada’s selection “will be good news for all our stakeholders in the fight against marine pollution, including Government Ministries, NGOs and interests in the private sector.”
Board member of the Dominica Solid Waste Management Corporation (DSWMC), Ms. Kimisha Thomas, conveyed gratitude on behalf of the Board of Directors, and the Ministry of Environment, Rural Modernisation, Kalinago Upliftment and Constituency Empowerment. She noted that the Project will help OECS member states “to align themselves to the United Nations Environment Assembly Resolution 5/14, which seeks to End Plastic Pollution.”
Recycle OECS is funded by the European Union and implemented by the OECS Commission in partnership with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The two-year Project supports the broader European Union (EU) Zero Waste initiative in the Caribbean Programme, which aims to strengthen the EU-Caribbean partnership for cooperation in the field of circular economy and solid waste management. AFD’s Director, Mr. Marc Dubernet, highlighted public policy dialogue and public awareness as project outputs that are essential for sustainability. “AFD would like to thank the European Union for its renewed trust towards our institution, as well as the OECS for our fruitful collaboration and the start of what will be, I believe, a high-impact project for the Caribbean region.”
Representing the EU at the ceremony was Ms. Susana Fuertes, Programme Officer and Climate Change Focal Point for Green Deal Partnership for the Caribbean. She indicated that the Project “will support the improvement in investment in the waste sector as well, which presents many opportunities for explorations and synergies under the Global Gateway Investment Agenda, which will be presented at the next summit in July.”
Following the official sign-off by the selected Member States, their waste management authorities will work with the technical consultants to commence stakeholder engagement activities to present the model and adapt it. Once finalized, the model will be made available to other OECS Member States and Small Island Developing States in the Region for adoption or adaption.
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Jamaica
MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Member of Parliament (MP) for Manchester Central Rhoda Crawford is urging the National Works Agency (NWA) to increase the pace of approving roadworks in her constituency.
“The Government allocated $40 million to all Members of Parliament. I did my submission in January. I understand that there are some procurement issues at the NWA head office in Kingston [and] I want to make a special appeal here today to the team at NWA,” Crawford told journalists during a function in Mandeville recently.
Motorists in Mandeville have complained about the deplorable state of roads close to the town centre, including a section of Manchester Road leading to the Northern Caribbean University.
But Crawford argued that the Manchester Road is among those which she submitted to the NWA for repairs some six months ago.
She charged that politicians are often blamed for the slow implementation of projects, while it is often State agencies which cause the delay.
“We want them to move as swiftly as they can while obeying the guidelines to get these projects out. It cannot be that I would have submitted several roads since January [and] it is six months later and none of those projects have been approved so that the work can start.
“When constituents and citizens don’t understand this, at the end of the day, it is the political representatives who gets blamed for these things, so I am appealing to the NWA, please, whatever the issues are in the procurement department, sort them out so that we can get the work of the people done,” added Crawford.
However, NWA Communications Manager Stephen Shaw defended the agency’s handling of the submissions made by MPs.
“What has happened is that we have projects for every Member of Parliament that we have to procure through this programme,” said Shaw.
“It is impossible for us to go through 200 projects, or thereabout, and for each project you have to do tenders. You might get three tenders on average per project, and that is putting it at 600 tenders that you have to…evaluate. So there are a lot of things involved before we get to the point where a contract is signed,” added Shaw.
He said, “Not everyone will see the activities at the same time,” in response to Crawford’s complaints.
“Yes, we have budgetary support from the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, but the rules of engagement remain the same. We have to follow the processes that have been established by the Government as it relates to the contracting process,” declared Shaw.
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Trinidad and Tobago
Residents of Penal Rock Road, the major road running from Penal to Basse Terre Village in Moruga, can soon breathe a sigh of relief as major repair works are set to begin.
Works and Transport Minister Rohan Sinanan, as well as director of the Programme for Upgrading Roads Efficiency Unit (PURE), Hayden Phillip, confirmed that tenders went out for repair work to three of four major landslips along Penal Rock Road.
The minister said the projects would be done in stages, adding that the ministry has “an aggressive landslip programme.” This programme includes PURE, Highways Division and the Bridges, Landslips and Traffic Management (BLT) Unit.
“We are addressing them, but they take some time especially now we have the procurement regulations. So whereas before we could have put out a tender and immediately get boots on the ground once it closed and award was made, there are certain processes now that have to take place,” Sinanan said.
“We are now working through those processes and it will take a little longer to get boots on the ground. However, everything is being addressed. We are also working with budgets.”
Sinanan said after the tenders are closed, they must be evaluated and timelines would be given before the works start.
Sinanan spoke on Thursday at Bonne Aventure Road in Gasparillo, where road works are ongoing on a massive landslip.
Sinanan, Phillip and other ministry officials visited Gasparillo and other areas where works are ongoing.
For years, residents in Santa Maria Village, Moruga have been begging for the roads to be repaired. Major landslips have prevented large vehicles from entering the rural community, and shop owners are forced to meet suppliers outside the community to buy goods.
Classes at the Santa Maria RC school often have to be dismissed early as water trucks cannot get to the location to give water.
A graduation and award ceremony is set for June 23 at the school under the theme “We are conquerors.”
On May 29, a fish vendor lost his goods after his van capsized while he was trying to manoeuvre on the deplorable road.
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Barbados
Independent Senator Dr Kristina Hinds wants to see a greater effort made to improve transparency in Government’s procurement process, as she suggested that some Barbadians were still “suspicous” about the system.
Speaking in the Upper House on Wednesday during debate on the Public Procurement (Amendment) Bill, 2023, Dr Hinds noted that despite the introduction of the e-procurement system, Bonfire, there was still concern among citizens that certain businesses continued to secure the major government contracts.
“If we look at Barbados and if we look at this region, some of the things that we may find are that some of the entities that have amassed wealth, that are wealth creators, are able to do so because of their ability to be successful in bidding for government contracts,” she said.
There is a fear and there is a suspicion – and this is not related to a particular government, I’m talking about something systemic – . . . that when it comes to the award of large contracts, the usual suspects are the ones who would feature prominently. The scraps would remain for those smaller players who, perhaps because of how the tender is constructed, would not be able to perhaps successfully bid for certain things.”
Individuals and companies supplying goods and services to the Government will have to be registered in the Bonfire procurement system which is in its pilot phase. It transitions the procurement process from paper-based to an electronic platform.
Although Hinds acknowledged that the new process will make applications for government contracts hassle-free, she said it did not go far enough to tackle the suspicions that Barbadians have about the process.
“We have to remember that these are tools, and these are not solutions. So we digitise something, it can solve some things. It can solve the long waits, for instance, but it does not solve some of the other things I was speaking about. The concern is that it is those within a network that are able to have access to particular contracts; that they might know about them early, for some reason that has nothing to do with this legislation or the technology,” said the Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.
She added that transparency in the political process is also crucial.
“The suspicion that remains in this country [is] that persons or entities who may be funding certain political activities may ‘have an in’ to the tendering process. There is a reason that suspicion exists, and that is because we do not know how political campaigns are financed from either side.
“Governments change and each time they change the suspicions remain. Technology is not going to solve that, having a register and having an online mechanism for registering and bidding is not going to address this,” Hinds asserted.
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Trinidad and Tobago
In March, the government, through iGovTT, invited tenders for a proposed Tier 4 data centre facility at Phoenix Park Industrial Estate.
Trinidad and Tobago has at least five working data centres.
Getting a response to questions on the matter took more than a month, as the query was bounced from the procurement agency, iGovTT, to the Ministry of Digital Transformation (MoDT).
The formal statement, in an email signed by Kemba Moses-Henry, Business Operations Assistant II of the ministry’s Engagement and Behavioural Communications Unit stated, “This data centre is required to service the immediate requirements for current digital transformation programmes and projects, and to support the long-term digitalisation vision for significantly enhanced resiliency and security for all government digital solutions.”
Why is it necessary to build another facility from scratch? Why not co-locate government servers in existing facilities pending an upgrade of those facilities to Tier 4 status?
“The government’s digital transformation agenda is highly focused on services to citizens and the proper management and handling of government and user data. As such, there is the conviction that the need for the government to own and manage its own data centre and associated technology to support those use-cases with highly sensitive or confidential datasets.”
One of the specifications that separates Tier 3 status from Tier 4 is the provision of electricity from two different suppliers. Trinidad and Tobago has only one, TTEC, and changing that requires an act of Parliament.
The prospectus for the MoDT project includes a solar park capable of producing 500 kilowatts of electricity. Will the government generate its own electricity for the facility in defiance of law?
A caveat in the published prospectus for the proposed data centre, notes that the project must have, “At a minimum Tier 3 certification at the point of commissioning if the elements for Tier 4 are not available within the timeline specified.”
Acknowledging the importance of the government retaining substantive control of sensitive national data, TSTT noted in a response to questions, that it has the only data centre in the Caribbean and Latin America with both TIA 942-B Rated 3 certification for infrastructure and DCOS maturity level 3 for operations.
Other data centre facilities run by Flow, AirLink and Fujitsu function at a minimum of Tier 2. Digicel announced plans for a Tier 3 facility in 2015.
Data centre certifications are a swamp land of acronyms, but the critical difference between Tier 3 and Tier 4 comes down to redundancy and uptime.
The strategic deployment of duplicate power sources, components and cooling systems raise the reliability of a data centre from 99.982% availability at Tier 3 to 99.995 availability at Tier 4.
That’s the difference between service recovery times of 1.6 hours and 26.3 minutes annually. The largely theoretical Tier 5 sets annual downtime at 5.3 minutes.
Tier 4 facilities have no single point of failure. The specification requires a duplicate, active version of every component in the data centre. That makes Tier 4 specified data centres as much as 50 per cent more expensive to build.
TSTT’s TIA 942-B Rated 3 data centre currently offers this concurrently maintainable site infrastructure.
“TSTT’s data centre services have grown exponentially over the years, to the extent that we have embarked on projects that add capacity to both our colocation services and our cloud portfolio,” the company explained.
“This increase in capacity is readily available to the Government and can be used immediately to ensure that there are no delays in the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s digital citizen road map and other key projects.”
The MoDT explained in its response that it plans public/private sector partnerships that will include the integration of local third-party data centres to support the expansion of its services.
“This will result in a general increase in the utilisation of all existing Data Centres and is not limited to Tier 3 Data Centres; the intention being that they will remain and grow,” the MoDT stated.
The Digital Transformation Ministry has specified a six-month project completion timeline after acceptance of a tender.
Some very rough calculations.
A 500Kw solar farm built to commercial standards costs around US$1 million.
Costs for Tier 4 data centre construction run to US$25,000 per Kw, suggesting an estimate of US$12.5 million for the proposed facility.
TSTT described itself as excited by the government’s planned data centre.
“TSTT stands ready and available to leverage our wealth of knowledge in the data centre and telecoms field to ensure that the national data dentre is unmatched both locally and regionally.”
TSTT is 51 per cent owned by government, which has, in practical terms, complete oversight of its operations. Competitor Liberty Global’s 49 per cent share is silent and uncompensated, pending the sale of those shares (https://bit.ly/3N993xo).
Eight years later, no buyer has emerged, leaving the organisation in Janus’ dilemma, one face toward its state owner, the other to its commercial responsibility to deliver stakeholder returns.
Is it time to remove this Chinese curtain of divided purpose before spending more than $100 million to create a data centre that already exists?
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