evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Blue Economy Technology Extension — Compete Caribbean's SME Support Programme in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Kingstown · See the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines profile · See the Kingstown profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 29% 76/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2018, the multi-donor Compete Caribbean facility has digitised St. Vincent and the Grenadines' business registry, funded technology audits for MSMEs, and backed blue-economy firms like SeaMoss Boss Canouan with matching grants and Coast Guard-run marine safety training.

US$87,948
RG-T3270 business-registry digitisation project cost (2018-2021)
75 audits across 50 firms
RG-T3322 technology audits for Caribbean MSMEs (2019-2024)
US$310,253
RG-T3520 e-one-stop-shop project cost (2019-2023)
US$60,000
RG-T4003 blue-economy technology-extension project cost (from 2021)
Blue Economy Technology Extension — Compete Caribbean's SME Support Programme in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (IDB / UK FCDO / CDB / Government of Canada), with InvestSVG and the Commerce & Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)
Period
2018–2025
Keywords
blue economy, SME development, business registration, technology extension, women-owned business

Context

St Vincent and the Grenadines has few large firms, and since 2018 the multi-donor Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (IDB, UK FCDO, Caribbean Development Bank, Government of Canada) has run a sequence of projects to modernise its business environment.

Objectives

The projects aimed to digitise business registration, extend technology-audit support to MSMEs, and back blue-economy enterprises with grants and safety training.

Activities

RG-T3270 (2018-2021, US$87,948) digitised the Commerce and Intellectual Property Office's paper business-registration archive dating to 1925; RG-T3322 (2019-2024) funded 75 technology audits for 50 Caribbean MSMEs including three St Vincent firms; RG-T3520 (2019-2023, US$310,253) built an electronic one-stop shop for business registration, live since 2023; RG-T4003 (from 2021, US$60,000) supported blue-economy firms, several women-owned, including SeaMoss Boss Canouan, which received Coast Guard-run marine-safety training for its harvesters in August 2025.

Results

The documented outputs are concrete but modest in scale - a handful of named firms and a few hundred thousand dollars across five project phases - with no aggregate revenue, export or job-creation figures published for beneficiary firms.

Conclusions

The programme shows steady multi-donor continuity and a widening scope from registry digitisation to blue-economy support, but its aggregate economic impact on beneficiary firms remains undocumented.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — Roughly US$458,000 in identified project funding across five phases (2018-2025), plus an unquantified matching-grant tranche under the related UBEC Regional MSME Matching Grant Programme.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Sequential funded phases from 2018 (registry digitisation) through an August 2025 Coast Guard marine-safety training session, each with its own multi-year timeline.
Staffing & skills
Compete Caribbean facility staff, InvestSVG, Commerce and Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) staff, St Vincent and the Grenadines Coast Guard trainers

Conditions for success

  • Multi-donor co-financing (IDB, UK FCDO, Caribbean Development Bank, Government of Canada)
  • Coordination with national delivery bodies (CIPO, InvestSVG, Coast Guard)
  • Targeting funding at specific named firms rather than broad, untargeted support

Common failure modes

  • No aggregate outcome metrics (revenue, exports, jobs) have been published, making programme-wide impact hard to assess
  • Scale remains small relative to the wider blue-economy sector - a handful of named firms across five phases

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful