Trinidad and Tobago
Every few years, countries across the Caribbean go to market for the same critical public goods.
Jamaica tenders for buses for the Jamaica Urban Transit Company. Trinidad and Tobago procures pharmaceuticals for its health system. Barbados replaces equipment in its public hospitals. Fifteen member states, 15 separate exercises each negotiated in isolation by governments that share the same climate, the same infrastructure challenges, and the same stretched public finances. The question we almost never ask is a strategic one: why are we still procuring alone?
The recent standoff between T&T and the Caricom Secretariat offers an uncomfortable but necessary opening to ask that question seriously. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s declaration that Caricom has been “failing for 52 years” and her threat to reduce T&T’s contribution of approximately 22% of the regional body’s budget surface a frustration many Caribbean citizens carry quietly
Regional institutions consume significant public resources while delivering uneven, poorly measured, and rarely scrutinised results. So while some are focusing on treaty obligations or who was invited to which retreat, at its root, the greater focus should be on strategic planning and the failure to define clear mandates for these institutions, measure performance against them, and hold leadership accountable for outcomes rather than activity.
We should demand that instead of withdrawal from these institutions, that regional institutions be redesigned to actually perform, beginning with the areas where the value case is clearest and the tools already exist. Physical procurement is one of those areas. We are a region of small island states with similar infrastructure needs, health burdens, and fiscal constraints. The logic of collective purchasing, pooling demand across borders to strengthen negotiating power, is straightforward.
The OECS Pharmaceutical Procurement Service has proven it works, pooling medicine purchasing across nine-member states and reducing medicine costs by approximately 20%, with average annual savings of US$4 million. PAHO operates a similar Strategic Fund across Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Caribbean Development Bank, which housed its Regional Procurement Centre at UTech, Kingston, has spent over a decade harmonising standards and building professional capacity across the region. The architecture for doing this better, for buses, medical equipment, school supplies, and government technology, already exists. What is missing is the political decision to use it.
Alongside pooled physical procurement sits an equally compelling argument for shared digital infrastructure. Caribbean governments are each spending separately to digitise land registries, health records, customs systems, and tax administration. Much of this investment is duplicated across 15 member states, building parallel systems that cannot speak to each other.
A regionally coordinated approach, with shared platforms for procurement portals, e-tendering, and public financial management, would reduce duplication, lower per-country technology costs, and create a transparent regional marketplace where suppliers and governments interact on common terms.
The benefits are real, but so are the risks. Linking cybersecurity infrastructure across Caribbean states raises serious questions about sovereignty, data governance, and shared vulnerability. Also, any regional digital integration must be built on robust agreed standards, independent audit mechanisms, and clear incident response protocols. Caricom’s IMPACS unit and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union have begun this work, but from the layman’s perspective, the pace has not matched the urgency.
The integrity argument runs through both themes. International evidence consistently places bribe costs in public procurement between 8% and 25% of contract value. A regional procurement mechanism, accountable to multiple governments simultaneously and subject to parliamentary scrutiny across several jurisdictions, structurally reduces the space for ministerial discretion to become ministerial interference. No single minister in any country will own the process.
Likewise, shared digital procurement platforms create auditable, transparent transaction records that are far harder to manipulate than the paper-based, ministry-managed processes that remain common across the region.
Caricom’s structural weakness is not unique to the Caribbean. It is characteristic of intergovernmental bodies designed to manage political relationships rather than deliver services. They produce communiqués where they should produce contracts. But the answer is not T&T’s disengagement. It is insisting that Caricom and Caribbean institutions work seriously alongside national procurement agencies, ministries of finance, and digital government units to build the coordinated delivery infrastructure that member states cannot build effectively alone.
The buses the travelling public wait for, the medicines the hospitals run short of, or the government systems that happen to crash on the day people take off to see about personal business are the daily experiences of Caribbean citizens no matter which country they live in.
Across the region, we are navigating institutions that are under-resourced, not because the money does not exist in aggregate but because we have never collectively decided to spend it more intelligently—and it is time we did.
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