Carib Scope

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  • SEOGS groeit verder: meer ruimte voor Local Content en Youth Hub

    SEOGS groeit verder: meer ruimte voor Local Content en Youth Hub

    After four days of productive dialogue among hundreds of global energy stakeholders, the 2026 Suriname Energy, Oil & Gas Summit (SEOGS) concluded Friday at Paramaribo’s Roeli’s Event Venue, with the event centering this year’s agenda on three pressing industry priorities: the global energy transition, technological innovation, and advancing local content development.

    Marny Daal-Vogelland, President and CEO of Fossil Energy Consultancy—the firm responsible for organizing the summit—expressed full satisfaction with the 2026 edition, noting that this year’s gathering was the largest in the event’s history. The overwhelming turnout, however, has already paved the way for planned expansions ahead of the 2027 summit.

    “Next year, we will restructure key components of the event. Our Local Content Hub and Youth Hub will be moving to the larger Hal 3 to accommodate the far higher interest than we initially projected,” Daal-Vogelland explained. “Moving into 2027, our priority will not be adding more exhibition booths, but deepening the quality of our programming and speaker lineup to deliver more meaningful, actionable insights for attendees.”

    Local content development emerged as the central theme of the 2026 summit, with a two-day public Local Content Forum held to unpack the multiple challenges and opportunities Suriname faces in embedding local communities and businesses into the growing energy sector. Daal-Vogelland noted that while local content is a widely discussed topic across the country, bringing coordinated action to the issue has remained a persistent hurdle. “We hope this summit has laid the groundwork for policymakers to advance concrete progress on this front,” she said.

    She added that many current approaches to local content development suffer from a rush to quick, profit-driven outcomes that do not deliver long-term value. While Daal-Vogelland praised ongoing investments in Suriname’s education sector, she emphasized that skills alone are not enough to drive sustainable local participation. “It is not just about learning. It is about mindset, resilience, and the internal drive to work toward the outcomes you want to achieve,” she said. “That is why mentorship is such a critical piece of the puzzle.”

    One of the most pressing challenges Daal-Vogelland highlighted is ongoing brain drain: many young Surinamese leave the country to study abroad after high school and do not return. “We cannot all leave. This is our home, and our country’s development is our collective responsibility,” she said, pointing to the unified national spirit seen during recent international football matches as an example of what collective commitment can achieve.

    The summit leader also stressed that Suriname’s long-term development must extend far beyond oil and gas, rejecting the overreliance on single commodities that marked the country’s past bauxite boom. “Development goes far beyond the energy sector. Technical industries are important, but ultimately people make the difference—across agriculture, small business, law, accounting, every part of the economy,” she explained. “When I was in primary school, we were told Suriname floated on bauxite, and we were proud of it. But we can never let ourselves become so one-sided again. We need to be prudent, save for the future through our national resource fund, and commit to full transparency in how we manage our natural wealth.”

    To achieve this sustainable vision, Daal-Vogelland argued that greater cross-sector collaboration is non-negotiable, noting that too many stakeholders currently operate in silos rather than working toward shared goals. “Even large competing corporations can collaborate effectively to advance collective goals. It is like a salad: you can see each individual ingredient, but together they create a cohesive whole,” she said. “Too often, we approach development with a go-it-alone mindset, but that does not work. You may move faster alone, but you will move much further when you work together. We need to build a national culture where connection and collaboration are at the center of everything we do.”

  • Cap

    Cap

    Haitian regional carrier Sunrise Airways has marked another key milestone in its ongoing Caribbean network expansion, officially launching two nonstop routes connecting Haiti’s Cap-Haïtien to popular destinations in the neighboring Dominican Republic on June 26, 2026.

    The new services link Cap-Haïtien to both Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic’s world-famous beach tourism hub, and Santiago de los Caballeros, the country’s second-largest economic and cultural center. Industry observers frame the move as part of Sunrise Airways’ long-held strategy to close connectivity gaps across the Caribbean, a region where cross-border air travel has long been limited by limited route options.

    Sébastien Bayard, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Sunrise Airways, emphasized the transformative impact of the new connections in a statement following the launch. “Adding these direct flights from Cap-Haïtien to Punta Cana and Santiago represents another meaningful step forward in building out our regional network,” Bayard explained. “These routes don’t just add new travel options for our passengers — they strengthen critical transportation links between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the entire broader Caribbean community. At the same time, they open up far more convenient access to both regional hubs and long-haul international destinations for travelers on both sides of the border.”

    Beyond increased convenience, the Cap-Haïtien-Punta Cana route carries specific strategic value for international travelers, serving as a key transit gateway for passengers connecting to long-haul flights departing from Punta Cana International Airport, one of the busiest air hubs in the Caribbean that hosts dozens of global carriers.

    Detailed scheduling for the new routes caters to both leisure and business travel needs. Flights to Santiago de los Caballeros, which serves the Cibao International Airport (STI), operate on a twice-weekly schedule every Monday and Friday. Departures from Cap-Haïtien are scheduled for the early afternoon, with a remarkably short flight time ranging between 30 and 45 minutes to cross the Haiti-Dominican border. For the Punta Cana route, which operates to Punta Cana International Airport (PUJ), services also run twice weekly on Mondays and Wednesdays. Departures from Cap-Haïtien are scheduled for 12:00 PM local time, with arrival in Punta Cana scheduled for 1:00 PM local time, and return flights departing Punta Cana at 2:00 PM local time.

    As of the launch date, ticket reservations for both new routes are already open to the public. Travelers can book tickets, check current availability, and review fare details through multiple channels: the airline’s official website www.sunriseairways.net, the official Sunrise Airways mobile application, the airline’s in-person sales offices, or through any authorized third-party travel agency.

    Founded in 2012, Sunrise Airways has built its business around the “One Caribbean” vision, which centers on creating a seamless, interconnected air transport network linking major population centers and tourism hubs across the Caribbean basin. To date, the carrier has transported nearly two million passengers, connecting destinations spanning Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Eastern Caribbean, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and multiple cities in the United States. This latest expansion aligns with the airline’s years-long goal of improving regional integration through accessible air travel.

  • $65m roadmap to jump‑start research, development, innovation

    $65m roadmap to jump‑start research, development, innovation

    Against the backdrop of growing global technological disruption and the unique structural challenges facing small island developing states (SIDS), independent Caribbean policy research group Future Barbados has launched a landmark draft five-year strategic plan that calls for $65 million in targeted investment to pivot the island nation from repeated short-term crisis management to sustained long-term economic resilience, anchored in science, technology and innovation-driven research and development.

    Known formally as the Barbados Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Roadmap, the 75-page strategic blueprint was commissioned more than a year ago with specialized technical support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Its core mission is to formalize the country’s innovation ecosystem, unlock critical financing, and accelerate the commercialization of homegrown science and technology outputs, moving beyond decades of siloed academic-only research models.

    Tamaisha Eytle Harvey, Director of Future Barbados, emphasized that large-scale investment in innovation is no longer an optional luxury for SIDS like Barbados — it is an existential necessity. Pointing to common everyday infrastructure gaps that reveal systemic weaknesses, she shared an anecdote from her commute to the roadmap’s launch event: navigating around unrecorded municipal service vehicles, avoiding unmarked road hazards, and juggling unstable digital connectivity while working remotely from her car. “Technology is moving faster than ever before. There is a need for advancements in AI, biotechnologies, everything — every part of our lives depends on technology these days,” Eytle Harvey said. “If we don’t give fiscal space, if we don’t give intellectual space to designing the long-term, more sustainable solutions, we will always be in crisis mode.”

    For decades, Eytle Harvey noted, Barbados has placed full responsibility for research and development exclusively on tertiary education institutions, a model that has constrained national growth. The new roadmap reframes innovation not as a niche academic activity, but as a core engine of national economic development, embracing experimentation, iteration and even calculated failure as necessary parts of progress. “The model that we’ve been using for many decades has put responsibility for this only on one set of people. It was only a university who’s in charge of solving the problems,” she explained. “Well, here we are where all of the problems are our problems. This is a national development entity and engine to be able to spend time, spend effort and resources in a strategic way on solution development. And that means failures, that means experimentation, that means imagination.”

    Despite a history of widespread regional underinvestment — where private sector research spending across Caribbean economies averages just 5.4% — Barbados has already made notable strides in building its innovation capacity. The country currently ranks 58th globally in frontier technology readiness, outperforming many peer SIDS. Eytle Harvey attributed this progress to Barbados’ long-held strong international reputation, stable political governance, and highly educated local workforce, as well as the rapid expansion of dedicated innovation institutions over the past eight years. Bodies including the Ministry of Innovation, Industry, Science and Technology (MIIST), GovTech Barbados, Barbados Pharmaceutical Inc., and the ROAD archive digitization project have all laid critical groundwork for the broader RDI strategy.

    Still, major bottlenecks continue to block widespread innovation growth. Barbados’ small domestic market of just 300,000 people, widespread data fragmentation, capital flight, and a lack of structured pathways to move early-stage research from lab benches to commercial markets all hinder progress. Eytle Harvey highlighted how critical national data remains locked in disconnected, static formats: scattered across personal drives as individual PDF files and unstandardized Excel spreadsheets, rather than centralized in a accessible, collaborative platform. “Currently, we rank very highly — I hope you read my sarcasm strongly — on any investment strategy around R&D,” she noted. “Having credibility internationally with the development banks, with investors, does make a strength and robustness in our governance systems that makes it easier to build a system like this. But with all of these assets, it’s like, okay, we have the ingredients in the kitchen, but we’re really missing some things to really make this robust.”

    To address these gaps, the RDI Roadmap splits the proposed $65 million total investment across three interconnected core pillars over the next five years. The first pillar, focused on direct project funding, allocates $29 million to expand doctoral research programs at the University of the West Indies and provide targeted support to help early-stage projects cross the commercial “valley of death” — the high-risk gap between proof of concept and market launch. Priority research areas under this pillar include turning invasive sargassum weed into value-added commercial products, developing new public health solutions for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and offering matching grants to grow specialized tech clusters.

    The second pillar focuses on expanding indirect financial support for private sector innovation, earmarking $16 million to train local businesses on how to access existing R&D and digital transformation tax credits, while launching new innovation voucher schemes to incentivize private research investment. The third and final pillar allocates $20 million to upgrade innovation infrastructure and cross-sector coordination, funding critical improvements to outdated physical research laboratories, building a secure sovereign open-data architecture, launching a centralized single-entry hub to streamline the transition of ideas from concept to market, and establishing an independent advisory board to enforce strong data governance and policy accountability.

    Eytle Harvey noted that the full build-out of a national innovation system would ultimately require a $100 million investment, but the $65 million targeted plan is a pragmatic, achievable starting point. “The only way we’re going to get innovation to happen in the firms and the private sector is to encourage this, not just by educational workshops, but by providing them with the financing and the spaces to do it,” she said. She added that outdated research infrastructure can no longer meet global standards: “We can’t be inviting people to Barbados to do R&D, and our labs are from 1965. It’s just a reality. It’s really hard to do the research when your things are stuck on the port for six weeks.”

    On the topic of open data, Eytle Harvey emphasized the untapped economic potential of a centralized, secure collaborative data platform. “We need to create this open data infrastructure that is secure, that is safe, that is sovereign, but it’s accessible and can be at one point monetized. Because ten per cent of zero, which is currently where the data is, is zero,” she explained.

    The roadmap identifies six high-impact priority sectors projected to deliver strong economic returns: pharmaceutical manufacturing, the blue economy, life sciences, renewable energy, digital technologies, and food security. To fund the plan, the framework proposes a blended financing model that combines $26 million in direct government contributions, flexible risk-mitigation capital from international development partners, and active co-investment from local and Barbadian diaspora businesses.

    Eytle Harvey stressed that the draft roadmap is a living, adaptive document, noting that regional strategic planning must remain flexible to keep up with the rapid pace of global technological change. “Barbados does not intend to be the best and the greatest at anything. It intends to be the robust space where we can pilot and model for the rest of the world, showing that from small island spaces, things can happen with proper political will, the necessary investments in specific places, and talent,” she said. “It does not make sense in this region at all to plan anything beyond a five-year cycle because in two years we’re gonna have to reevaluate what this is and readjust it based on what the global situation is. But if we’re not doing multiple things at the same time, we’re not going to get to those results.”

    Founded to bridge long-standing gaps between government, academia and the private sector, Future Barbados carries out independent policy research, hosts inclusive public consultations, and pilots programs that turn innovative ideas into actionable on-the-ground projects. The organization provides strategic advice on priority investments, mobilizes global technical partners, and channels international funding into local development initiatives, with a core focus on innovation, good governance, and inclusive economic growth.

  • Central Bank says almost all delayed public wages paid

    Central Bank says almost all delayed public wages paid

    Six days after widespread delays hit government salary payments following the launch of Barbados’ new real-time payment infrastructure BiMPay, the Central Bank of Barbados released a significant progress update Friday, confirming that more than 99 percent of the stuck payments have now been issued to employees. Only roughly 160 payments remain unresolved as authorities continue to iron out kinks in the transition to the new system.

    Of the approximately 27,367 salary payments owed to workers across central government departments, the Barbados Revenue Authority, and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, the Central Bank confirmed that 27,206 have been successfully processed and deposited into recipients’ accounts. The situation across the island’s statutory corporations mirrors this progress, the report added, with the vast majority of public sector workers at those entities also having received their due compensation.

    In its official statement, the regulator issued a formal apology to the small share of employees still waiting for their pay, acknowledging the significant personal and financial strain the extended delays have created for affected households. “We recognise the financial and personal distress this has caused, and resolving the remaining outstanding payments remains a top priority for our team,” the Central Bank noted.

    The current backlog emerged when payments transitioned to BiMPay earlier this month. From the outset, the Central Bank has clarified that the problem does not stem from any technical flaw in the new payment platform itself. Instead, the issue traces back to incorrectly formatted payroll account information submitted by government employers, a discrepancy that slipped through the cracks under the nation’s old batch-based payment system.

    Under the previous processing framework, minor account data errors could be corrected manually by intermediaries during batch processing. But as a real-time instant settlement system, BiMPay requires fully validated, correctly formatted account information to be included in payment files before they are uploaded to the platform, since transactions clear instantly once submitted. This operational shift created unexpected gaps when legacy payroll data was moved over to the new system.

    Since the delays were first reported, the Central Bank says it has maintained constant, close coordination with commercial banks, government agencies, public sector employers, and other key financial institutions to identify and correct non-compliant account information that failed to meet BiMPay’s processing standards. “Where necessary, valid account information is being obtained so that outstanding payments can be processed without further delay,” the statement explained. “This is a significant operational change, and all parties are working to complete the remaining corrections as quickly as possible.”

    Amid ongoing resolution efforts, the Central Bank emphasized that BiMPay itself has not experienced any operational disruptions. The platform continues to process regular interbank transactions as normal while teams focus on fixing the payroll data errors. “BiMPay remains operational and continues to process interbank transactions while the remaining payroll account corrections are being completed,” the statement added.

    In addition to updating progress on salary payments, the regulator confirmed that government pension payments were scheduled for processing Friday, and that it is collaborating closely with relevant government bodies and financial institutions to ensure those payments are completed on time.

    For public sector employees who have not yet received their scheduled salary, the Central Bank advised that they continue working directly with their department’s human resources or finance teams. These internal departments maintain direct communication lines with relevant financial institutions to verify and correct problematic payroll account details, speeding up the resolution process for individual cases.

  • Cabinet Approves New Trade Deal with El Salvador

    Cabinet Approves New Trade Deal with El Salvador

    With just one week remaining before the official signing ceremony, Belize’s Cabinet has formally approved a groundbreaking new partial scope trade agreement with El Salvador that is set to reshape the country’s trade strategy and open new commercial opportunities for domestic producers and entrepreneurs.

    The agreement, scheduled to be signed on July 2 in San Salvador, marks the culmination of more than 18 months of deliberate negotiations between the two Latin American nations. Formal talks first kicked off in December 2024, with the inaugural negotiating round hosted in Belmopan, Belize’s capital. Progress moved steadily through subsequent discussions: by the third negotiating session held the following August, trade teams from both sides had reached consensus on every core chapter of the agreement, leaving only two technical annexes to be finalized in the following months.

    For Belize, the new trade deal is a core pillar of the government’s broader economic strategy to reduce reliance on traditional export markets by expanding market access across Latin America. Officials emphasize that the agreement will not only diversify Belize’s export footprint but also deepen regional economic integration and unlock new bilateral investment flows for domestic businesses of all sizes.

    Agriculture has emerged as a central priority throughout the negotiation process, as Belize seeks to expand access for its farm products to the Salvadoran market. Since El Salvador relies on imports for a large share of its domestic food consumption, government officials view the Central American nation as a high-potential growth market for Belizean agricultural producers. To address logistics barriers for cross-border trade, Belize’s Agriculture Minister Rodwell Ferguson held discussions with Guatemalan officials in March 2025 to coordinate transit arrangements for Belizean goods traveling through Guatemalan territory to reach El Salvador. Negotiators are also working to finalize a complementary memorandum of understanding that will clearly outline which specific products will be covered under the new preferential trade terms.

    The approval of the agreement comes at a pivotal moment for Belize’s regional leadership: starting in July 2026, the country will assume the rotating presidency of the Central American Integration System (SICA), a role that will give it the opportunity to shape the regional agenda on issues ranging from cross-border trade to climate disaster preparedness over the next six months.

    On the same day that Cabinet issued its approval, Prime Minister John Briceño held a bilateral meeting with El Salvador’s Vice President Félix Ulloa. In a statement released alongside the Cabinet’s announcement, Briceño noted that the pair discussed strengthening institutional cooperation, deepening bilateral partnership, and exploring new cross-sector collaboration opportunities that will deliver tangible shared benefits to the people of both nations.

  • COMMENTARY: A PHONE, A JAR OF SEASONING, AND 400,000 VIEWS – How Caribbean vendors are taking on the supermarkets, one TikTok at a time

    COMMENTARY: A PHONE, A JAR OF SEASONING, AND 400,000 VIEWS – How Caribbean vendors are taking on the supermarkets, one TikTok at a time

    It started with a simple, unplanned clip: a Barbadian spice seller propped her smartphone against a glass jar on her cluttered kitchen counter, walked viewers through her signature fish seasoning blend, and hit upload. Three days later, that unpolished home video had racked up 400,000 organic views. No professional film crew, no marketing agency, no six-figure advertising budget – reach that even a major regional supermarket chain could not purchase with a million-dollar promotional campaign.

    This quiet viral success is not an isolated accident. It is part of a growing movement reshaping small business across the Caribbean, where decades-old market stall vendors are leveraging TikTok to level the playing field against multinational grocery chains that have squeezed small independent sellers out of local markets in recent years.

    To unpack this unexpected trend, Guyanese-American PhD candidate Roy Naipaul spent months conducting on-the-ground interviews with vendors across the Caribbean region. Working alongside his doctoral supervisor Dr. Abdallah Elias at the International Executive School in Strasbourg, France, Naipaul set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do cash-strapped small vendors, with no corporate backing or formal marketing budget, not just survive but grow their customer bases in the face of well-resourced retail giants? What he uncovered was not a sophisticated corporate marketing playbook, but a grassroots, community-driven model built one unscripted video at a time.

    The strategy that has worked for these vendors is stubbornly simple, and defies traditional marketing logic. Budget size barely moves the needle on TikTok; what determines reach is whether viewers stay to watch an entire video. Multiple vendors described the same unwritten rule of the platform: audiences, not advertising dollars, decide which content gets amplified. The result? A single vendor with a $500 smartphone can reach just as many potential customers as a large chain with a marketing team 20 times the size of the vendor’s entire business.

    The most surprising twist in Naipaul’s research is that their competitive advantage comes from what the corporate world would see as a weakness: their lack of professional polish. A doubles vendor in Trinidad found that chatting to the camera like she would chat to a regular customer while mixing her signature Indo-Caribbean dough generated far more audience engagement than any slickly produced supermarket advertisement. Customers do not want overproduced corporate content, she explained; they want to connect with real people. TikTok has upended traditional marketing rules by turning everyday creators into their brand’s most powerful advocates, with authenticity spreading organically through word-of-mouth, organic shares, clicks and views.

    Vendors have intentionally leaned into characteristics that were once seen as disadvantages for mainstream marketing: thick regional accents, messy home cooking spaces, generations-old family recipes, and local creole dialects. A vendor in St. Lucia intentionally films in Kwéyòl, instantly signaling to viewers that she is a member of the local community. A Jamaican vendor calls out loyal customers by name mid-video – for example, noting she has set aside a batch of a customer’s favorite mangoes – and watches that personal touch drive shares across local social media groups.

    The reach of these videos has extended far beyond Caribbean islands, exceeding even the vendors’ wildest expectations. Diaspora communities in New York, Toronto, and London have stumbled on the clips, flooding comments with nostalgia for home cooking and placing orders for specialty seasonings to be shipped internationally. Street markets that once only served customers within a few square miles now boast a global customer base.

    None of these vendors had a formal guide to social media success. They learned through trial and error: posting multiple cuts of the same video, tracking which gained traction, and replicating the tactics that worked.

    What stood out most to Naipaul was not one viral trick, but a repeating pattern that held across every interview: a vendor’s genuine authenticity draws viewers in, longer watch times signal to TikTok’s algorithm that the content is valuable, the algorithm pushes the video to more users, and those new viewers turn into repeat customers who follow for future content. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: the more a vendor embraces what makes them uniquely themselves, the more their visibility grows, which in turn strengthens the personal community relationships that make the content popular in the first place.

    While the organic algorithm that rewards engagement has let small vendors compete with large chains, it also carries a major, unresolvable risk. Every one of these small business owners has built their new customer base on a platform they do not control and cannot influence. A single unannounced change to TikTok’s algorithm, made to serve the platform’s own corporate goals unrelated to Caribbean small vendors, could bury their content under the same corporate marketing they have been outperforming, with no warning and no process to appeal the change. The open accessibility that let these vendors break into the global market could just as easily close the door on them, with no input from the vendors themselves.

    Naipaul’s research also points to a new model for supporting small vendors that runs counter to common economic development advice. These vendors did not need paid social media training – they taught themselves, quickly and for free, by sharing tips and learning from each other’s successes. Pressuring them to adopt corporate marketing practices would backfire, because it would strip away the exact quality that makes their content work: its unapologetically non-corporate, personal feel.

    For now, the story of Caribbean TikTok vendors is an unlikely underdog success. Small independent sellers are not just surviving the era of big-box supermarkets – in corners of social media, they are thriving, one unpolished video filmed with a phone propped against a spice jar at a time. Whether this momentum will last remains an open question, and it is one these vendors cannot answer on their own.

  • The tourism boom is also driving up informal businesses in the Dominican Republic

    The tourism boom is also driving up informal businesses in the Dominican Republic

    The Dominican Republic’s booming tourism sector has emerged as a key catalyst for grassroots entrepreneurship, drawing thousands of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) eager to tap into the industry’s growing momentum and untapped economic potential. But a new national survey has uncovered a major structural barrier holding this vibrant ecosystem back: nearly half of all tourism-linked MSMEs operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, leaving them less competitive and disproportionately exposed to economic shocks.

    The 2025 Sectoral Survey of Tourism (Ensetur 2025), conducted by the Dominican Republic’s National Institute of Migration (INM RD), analyzed MSME operations across three of the country’s highest-profile tourist hubs: Punta Cana-Macao, Barahona-Pedernales, and Puerto Plata. Of the roughly 642 MSMEs included in the study, 42.2% are classified as informal, meaning they lack official registration and compliance with local business regulations.

    The data confirms a clear trend across the sector: informality is heavily concentrated among the smallest business operations. The survey finds that 71.6% of all informal tourism MSMEs are micro-enterprises employing five or fewer workers, a share that is 22.5 percentage points higher than the rate of micro-enterprises among formal, regulated businesses in the sector. This pattern aligns with a broader industry dynamic: larger tourism operations are far more likely to comply with national regulations, while smaller, newer ventures disproportionately remain in the informal economy.

    Most informal MSMEs in the sector operate in the food and beverage segment, accounting for 76.4% of all informal businesses. That is 17.6 percentage points higher than the share of formal, registered tourism MSMEs that work in food and beverage. Geographically, half of all surveyed informal MSMEs (52%) are located in the top tourist hub of Punta Cana-Macao, 41% are based in Puerto Plata, and just 7% operate across Barahona and Pedernales, according to reporting from local outlet Diario Libre.

    The INM RD study emphasizes that informal activity in tourism is not a new issue, but a deeply entrenched characteristic of the sector that is closely tied to migrant labor integration. Most informal tourism roles offer low social protection, high worker turnover, and little regulatory oversight, which amplifies the socioeconomic vulnerability of migrant workers who make up a large share of this labor force. At the same time, the research acknowledges that informal micro-enterprises fill a critical economic role for marginalized communities: they are a key source of household income for vulnerable groups and a primary pathway for migrant workers to enter the Dominican labor market, thanks to their small operating scale, flexible organizational structures, and reliance on labor-intensive work.

    Despite these benefits, the concentration of unregulated micro-enterprises in major tourist centers creates significant policy challenges for national authorities. The informal sector’s high demand for flexible, seasonal, low-skilled labor is overwhelmingly filled by migrant workers, which complicates efforts to formalize employment, enforce consistent labor standards, and manage migration flows effectively.

    A breakdown of employment data underscores the gap between formal and informal operations. Among properly registered MSMEs, companies with 20 or more employees account for 61.5% of all jobs generated by the sector. By contrast, more than 85% of all informal tourism employment is concentrated in businesses with fewer than 10 workers. When sorted by occupation, informality rates exceed formal employment rates across multiple key tourism roles: 19.7% of all kitchen staff work in informal positions, followed by 15.6% of cleaning staff, 13% of general service workers, and 12.2% of management roles, per the survey.

    INM RD officials noted that the study’s scope was limited to MSMEs, as the research team was unable to access operational data from the country’s large, multinational hotel chains.

  • United will connect Houston with Santo Domingo during the winter season

    United will connect Houston with Santo Domingo during the winter season

    United Airlines has unveiled plans to expand its route footprint across Latin America and the Caribbean with the launch of a new seasonal air route linking Houston, Texas, to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. The new service is scheduled to launch during the 2026/27 Northern Hemisphere winter season, a timeframe that consistently sees surges in travel demand driven by year-end holiday tourism, family visits and friend reunions.

    Operations will run from December 18, 2026, through January 3, 2027, with three weekly flights all operated using Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft. Under the published schedule, outbound flights will depart from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston during the afternoon, arriving at the Santo Domingo destination after nightfall. For return trips, flights will take off from the Dominican capital in the early morning, a timing arrangement crafted to give passengers convenient access to fast connections through United’s Houston hub to dozens of domestic and international destinations across the carrier’s global network.

    This carefully tailored schedule is designed to deliver maximum travel flexibility for passengers during one of the busiest annual travel windows on the global aviation calendar. As a temporary seasonal addition to United’s route portfolio, the new link directly addresses the steadily rising travel demand between the United States and the Caribbean, a region that has steadily strengthened its standing as one of the top tourist markets across the Americas.

    Industry analysts note that Santo Domingo holds unique strategic value for major air carriers, drawing consistent passenger volumes across leisure tourism, family travel and business segments. For its part, Houston remains one of United Airlines’ most critical connecting hubs, enabling seamless travel connectivity to and from hundreds of cities across North America, Europe and Asia. The expansion marks the latest step in United’s ongoing push to beef up its presence in high-demand Latin American and Caribbean markets, aligning with broader industry trends of growing air travel between the U.S. and popular Caribbean holiday destinations.

  • DSB behaalt internationale certificering voor informatiebeveiliging

    DSB behaalt internationale certificering voor informatiebeveiliging

    Suriname’s leading financial institution DSB Bank has achieved the globally recognized ISO 27001 certification for information security, marking a major milestone in the bank’s commitment to international data protection standards. The official certificate was formally awarded Thursday by global certification body DNV (Det Norske Veritas) during the annual Suriname Energy, Oil & Gas Summit (SEOGS), with representatives from both organizations presenting the credential at the event.

    This independent certification confirms that DSB Bank has structured its entire information security framework in full alignment with the strict international requirements laid out in the ISO 27001 standard. DNV, the certifying body, is a leading global classification and risk management firm that operates more than 300 offices across over 100 countries, with service lines covering maritime, energy, transportation, aviation, food production and healthcare. The firm has maintained a presence in Suriname since the 1990s, and 2026 marks its second consecutive participation in the SEOGS event.

    DSB Bank first publicly announced its goal to obtain ISO 27001 certification in 2025. According to Ashna Kamta, Chief Risk Officer at DSB Bank, the institution had already aligned its internal practices with international information security standards for many years, but formal third-party certification delivers critical independent validation of these efforts.

    Kamta noted that the certification process was no simple feat, requiring substantial financial and operational investment to meet all stringent requirements. The official certification track launched just one year ago, and completing the full process within 12 months stands as strong proof of DSB’s compliance with global benchmarks, she added. She also emphasized that comprehensive information security extends far beyond just digital cybersecurity protections.

    “It also covers physical security of bank facilities, tightly controlled access protocols for different restricted areas, and clear authorization hierarchies for data access,” Kamta explained. “Beyond that, we require all our staff to handle customer data with extreme care, store documentation securely, and only disclose information to properly authorized individuals.”

    As Suriname’s largest bank, DSB currently serves more than 200,000 customers across the country. The bank’s 2025 annual report shows that total assets under management grew 19% year-over-year from 2024, alongside consistent expansion in the adoption of digital banking services and point-of-sale digital payments among customers.

    Kamta expects the new ISO 27001 certification will further strengthen trust among international investors and global business partners. DSB is positioning itself to play a central role in Suriname’s fast-growing emerging oil and gas sector, an industry that places extremely high demands on information security and risk management practices.

    The certification also reflects a growing trend across Suriname’s business community, DNV representatives Ronald Von Bannisseht and Ruurdt Jukema pointed out. Demand for international third-party certifications has risen noticeably in recent years, driven largely by the expansion of the country’s offshore oil and gas industry. Local companies are increasingly recognizing that formal certification does more than improve internal risk management – it also strengthens their competitive standing in the global marketplace, the DNV representatives noted. To date, DNV has issued certifications to multiple Surinamese enterprises, including a number of companies active directly and indirectly in the oil and gas sector.

  • ABHTA Trains Hospitality Professionals in Kitchen Management and Leadership

    ABHTA Trains Hospitality Professionals in Kitchen Management and Leadership

    Antigua and Barbuda’s leading tourism industry body has marked a major milestone in workforce development for the local hospitality sector, closing out its second annual professional training program focused on elevating kitchen operations and leadership for culinary teams across the islands.

    The Antigua and Barbuda Hotels and Tourism Association (ABHTA) wrapped its 2024 iteration of *Kitchen Management Essentials: People, Systems & Service*, a two-day intensive training held June 17–18 at the Muriel O’Mard Campus. The program brought together culinary professionals from a wide range of local hotels, restaurants, and hospitality outlets, all aiming to refine their core management capabilities that underpin smooth, profitable kitchen operations.

    Led by Olvanah Richardson, Executive Sous Chef at Antigua’s renowned Blue Waters Hotel, the curriculum covered a comprehensive set of high-priority topics for modern kitchen management. Sessions delved into foundational team leadership strategies, rigorous food safety protocols, efficient inventory tracking and management, accurate food costing to protect profit margins, practical waste reduction techniques that cut costs and support sustainability, and consistent execution of high-quality customer service standards.

    At the conclusion of the program, all participants who completed the full training received official certificates, celebrating both their successful mastery of new skills and their ongoing commitment to continuous professional growth within the hospitality sector. For many attendees, the training fills a critical gap between hands-on culinary experience and the management expertise needed to advance into senior kitchen leadership roles.

    Looking ahead, ABHTA has already announced its next targeted professional development initiative for local hospitality workers: the *Supervisory Management Development Course*, scheduled to run from September 10 to October 15, 2026. The association confirmed that interested hospitality professionals can reach out directly to ABHTA’s administrative team for full details on curriculum, eligibility, and registration for the upcoming course.

    Industry observers note that ongoing workforce training initiatives like these play a key role in strengthening Antigua and Barbuda’s competitive position in the global luxury travel market, by ensuring local hospitality teams maintain the high standards of service and operational efficiency that international travelers expect.