![OP-ED 1of 5: [The Big Push Series] Growth is not enough. The Caribbean needs a push that reaches everyone](https://wp.caribscopeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1ac8c7828699e815ca9c205196ed3e40.jpg)
In January 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), Governor Timothy Antoine posed a question that would reframe the region’s development trajectory: what would it take to double the size of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) economies over the next 10 years? He dubbed this goal the Big Push. Now, three years later, the ECCB has embedded this ambition into its official 2026-2031 Strategic Plan, titled Collective Action for Shared Prosperity — and the region is being called to move beyond empty applause and cynical dismissal to deliver the clear, honest assessment this critical moment requires.
This new article series is not presented as a pre-packaged set of solutions. Instead, it serves as an urgent, open invitation to a region-wide conversation that includes private sector stakeholders, civil society organizations, and ordinary citizens from all corners of the Eastern Caribbean. The series aligns with the ECCB’s overarching ambition, but rejects the dangerous myth that ambition alone, or even gross growth alone, is enough to deliver meaningful change.
The Eastern Caribbean has experienced periods of economic expansion before. What it has never achieved is growth that reaches and lifts marginalized groups: the young person stuck in informal work with no upward mobility, the woman navigating an economic system never designed to accommodate her, and communities that watch wealth flow through their islands without ever taking root. Growth that fails to lift these groups is not transformation — it is merely a rearrangement of existing wealth and power.
## A Shifting Global Order That Leaves No Room for Passivity
The post-Cold War liberal international order that shaped Caribbean development for decades is collapsing in real time, and no major global power is building its replacement with Eastern Caribbean interests in mind. New actors have emerged as major players in the region: China has established itself as a significant development partner, while Gulf states are expanding their footprint through sovereign wealth fund investments in local assets. Meanwhile, the United States frames its engagement through security frameworks that tie financial aid to strict policy compliance.
No outside power will come to secure the Eastern Caribbean’s future on the region’s own terms. The choice facing the bloc is not between global engagement and isolation — it is between actively shaping the terms of that engagement, or passively accepting terms set by others. In this new global context, the Big Push is far more than a development strategy: it is a core strategy for protecting the region’s survival and national sovereignty.
## Growth Is Necessary — But Inclusive, Transformative Growth Is The Only Goal That Matters
To illustrate the gap between official growth metrics and lived economic reality, the series highlights the story of 24-year-old Dwayne from Kingstown, St. Vincent. After completing secondary school and two short vocational training programs, Dwayne applied for 47 formal jobs over three years. He received just three interviews and no job offers. Today, he drives a taxi he does not own, earning as little as EC$40 on a slow week and no more than EC$150 on a good week.
Official labor statistics classify Dwayne as “self-employed informal” — not unemployed. His fare earnings are counted in gross GDP calculations, but those numbers ignore the reality of his life: he has no pension, no health insurance, no access to affordable credit, and no reason to believe the formal economy will ever create a place that needs him. Dwayne is not just another economic statistic — he is the true test of the Big Push. If this initiative cannot improve his life and prospects, it has failed, no matter how impressive the official GDP growth numbers may look.
Between 2000 and 2019, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) recorded positive economic growth in most years. Yet even amid that expansion, male participation in tertiary education declined steadily, youth unemployment remained stuck at persistently high levels, and soaring energy import bills drained household budgets across the region. The informal sector grew not because workers preferred informal work, but because the formal economy offered no viable alternative for millions. Unfocused growth, the series argues, is like rain that falls on bare soil: it runs off quickly before it can nourish deep, long-lasting change.
The Big Push must explicitly target inclusive, multi-dimensional growth across four interconnected priorities, according to the author. First, it must prioritize integrating men into the formal economy: this is not a symbolic political gesture, but an economic necessity, as a region that loses a large share of its male population to violence, informality, and emigration operates at a fraction of its full productive potential. Second, it must advance gender equity in access to opportunity, asset ownership, and economic leadership — decades of evidence confirm that broader, more equitable participation drives faster growth and fairer wealth distribution. Third, it must embed environmental sustainability: an economy built on fossil fuels in a region facing intensifying hurricanes and mass coral bleaching is not building wealth — it is borrowing from a future it is actively destroying. Fourth, it must advance economic sovereignty: the ability to make independent development choices on the region’s own terms, not the terms set by outside actors bringing capital. These four priorities are not competing — they are different angles of the same core goal.
The series will focus on three key sectors that advance all four priorities at once: sports, creative industries, and renewable energy.
## The Unanswered Question Facing The Region’s Dominant Tourism Industry
Any honest conversation about Eastern Caribbean economic transformation must confront the role of the region’s largest industry: tourism. The Eastern Caribbean is one of the world’s top cruise tourism hubs, hosting millions of visitors every year. But the vast majority of revenue generated by this sector flows to foreign multinational corporations, and local economic linkages — through local food supply, crafts, culture, and professional services — remain far weaker than they should be after decades of development efforts.
The series poses two urgent questions that the sector must answer: Can international hotel chains build genuine, accessible career pathways that allow local Caribbean workers to advance from entry-level roles all the way to management and business ownership? Can the tourism sector lead the transition to renewable energy, which would cut the sector’s own operating costs while reducing the crippling energy import burden that weighs on every household across the islands? These are not rhetorical questions — they are the opening of a negotiation that the Eastern Caribbean has long been too deferential to start.
## Confronting The Region’s Long-Standing Implementation Deficit
The series does not shy away from a long-standing pattern that has derailed past development efforts in the Caribbean: excellent policy frameworks are drafted, launched with fanfare at international conferences, endorsed by regional governments, then filed away on a shelf alongside every previous “excellent framework.” The gap between policy and practice in the Caribbean is not a failure of intelligence or ambition — it is a failure of accountability.
Without a robust, independent accountability framework to match its analytical ambition, the Big Push will end up in the same development graveyard as all past initiatives, the author warns. What is needed is public, quarterly tracking dashboards for key metrics, mandatory parliamentary debates on progress, and independent civil society audit mechanisms with the authority to publish public reports when implementation falls short. Without these safeguards, this new conversation will end the same way so many regional conversations end: with a closing communiqué, a commemorative photo, and almost no real change.
## An Open Invitation, Not A Final Verdict
This series is not written by someone claiming to have all the answers. Instead, it is rooted in evidence-based belief that the systemic conditions that have held back Eastern Caribbean development can be changed. What critical questions are we not asking today? Which communities are being excluded from this conversation? What does the tourism sector need to hear, and what does it need to share, to build a genuine, mutually beneficial partnership? These questions cannot be answered by a single series alone. They require the participation of churches, trade unions, diaspora organizations, young athletes on training grounds, small business women operating on credit, and all other segments of society — all at the table, all recognized as architects of the future, not just passive audience members.
No outside power will build this future for the Eastern Caribbean on the region’s own terms. But if all stakeholders come together with the honesty this moment demands, we can build a future that lasts. The first installment of the series will focus on sport as a formal economic industry, and readers and stakeholders are invited to attend the ECCB’s 10th Annual Growth and Resilience Dialogue — Big Push Conference, held April 22-24, 2026. This article is written by Prof. C. Justin Robinson, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal of The University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus, Antigua and Barbuda, and does not represent the official views of Duravision Inc. or Dominica News Online.
