Curaçao's UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment — Mapping AI Governance and Classroom Adoption on a Small Island

UNESCO's Office for the Caribbean and Curaçao's Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports (MOWCS) completed a national Artificial Intelligence Readiness Assessment (RAM) in 2024, published in 2025 — Curaçao is described in the report as "the first small island to conduct and launch such an assessment." Minister Sithree van Heydoorn launched the report on 4 April 2025, and more than 60 people across 40 organisations, including government ministries, the University of Curaçao, the Chamber of Commerce, labour unions and NGOs such as CARMABI, were consulted.

On education specifically, the report finds MOWCS is running the island's largest digitalisation project, covering more than 25,000 users, with over 80% of primary, lower-secondary and secondary schools already connected to the internet for educational purposes. Instructors have been receiving informal awareness and laboratory training on generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT, and on how to adapt coursework around them, but Curaçao's three local universities offer no dedicated degree in AI, machine learning or data science, and about a third of the roughly 1,500-2,000 local tertiary students are enrolled in ICT-adjacent fields.

The report also documents a stark STEM gender gap — male graduates outnumber female graduates seven to one in engineering, a faculty of about 150 students total — and notes that MOWCS's digitalisation project explicitly targets closing new digital-gender and socio-economic gaps as it rolls out devices and connectivity to every pupil and teacher.

The assessment is candid about limits: it is explicitly "not a report card" and records no measured learning outcomes. National AI adoption across the public and private sectors is estimated at only 5-7%, Curaçao has no AI-specific transparency, liability or data-protection law, and the National AI Strategy that is meant to act on these findings was, at the time of the report, still in development.

Read the full analysis: https://rac.cw/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/394952eng_UNESCO-AI-readyness-of-Curacao-2.pdf