There has been a re­newed em­pha­sis on ven­ture cap­i­tal as a means of ad­dress­ing the fi­nanc­ing gap of en­tre­pre­neurs in Trinidad & To­ba­go. How­ev­er, sev­er­al ques­tions have emerged. Will the lat­est ven­ture cap­i­tal push de­liv­er this time around? Will en­tre­pre­neurs ac­cess the growth cap­i­tal they need? Will the re­cent push be­come an­oth­er well-in­ten­tioned ini­tia­tive that will fail to de­liv­er on ex­pec­ta­tions?

These ques­tions are per­ti­nent, giv­en that es­tab­lish­ing funds and an­nounc­ing fi­nanc­ing com­mit­ments are not nec­es­sar­i­ly ev­i­dence of a well-func­tion­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal mar­ket. Of greater sig­nif­i­cance is the abil­i­ty of suit­able busi­ness­es to ac­cess the cap­i­tal, ex­per­tise and net­works they need to grow and scale.

T&T has been here be­fore—Lessons from the past

At­tempts at de­vel­op­ing the non-tra­di­tion­al fi­nanc­ing mar­ket is not new to T&To. The first ma­jor at­tempt was the Ven­ture Cap­i­tal In­cen­tive Pro­gramme (VCIP), in­tro­duced un­der the Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Act of 1994. This ini­tia­tive sought to mo­bilise pri­vate cap­i­tal for in­vest­ment in qual­i­fy­ing busi­ness­es us­ing tax cred­its as in­cen­tives. Lat­er, in 2012, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Eq­ui­ty Fund, be­gan op­er­a­tions with $25 mil­lion avail­able as eq­ui­ty fi­nanc­ing for el­i­gi­ble To­ba­go busi­ness­es. In the same year. the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change’s SME Mar­ket was es­tab­lished, cre­at­ing an op­por­tu­ni­ty for more es­tab­lished SMEs to raise eq­ui­ty cap­i­tal on the pub­lic mar­ket.

More re­cent­ly, the Shap­ing the Fu­ture of In­no­va­tion Pro­gramme, launched in 2021 through a part­ner­ship in­volv­ing the Gov­ern­ment, Eu­ro­pean Union, IDB Lab and Cariri, has pro­vid­ed blend­ed fi­nanc­ing. With ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$10 mil­lion in pro­gramme fund­ing, it has re­port­ed­ly chan­nelled more than US$7.5 mil­lion to SMEs across sec­tors in­clud­ing ICT, man­u­fac­tur­ing, agro-pro­cess­ing, re­new­able en­er­gy and health.

The above-men­tioned ini­tia­tives are proof that the chal­lenge of ac­cess to fi­nanc­ing has been recog­nised by suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments and that at­tempts have been made to ad­dress the is­sue. As this writer has re­peat­ed­ly ad­vo­cat­ed, the is­sue of cap­i­tal to SMEs hinges on the ex­is­tence of a pipeline of in­vest­ment-ready busi­ness­es and a pool of pri­vate cap­i­tal suf­fi­cient­ly large to or­ches­trate funds to sup­port the growth po­ten­tial of the tar­get­ed in­vestee com­pa­nies. Suc­cess in the ven­ture cap­i­tal mar­ket must be mea­sured by the scope and scale of in­vest­ments made, the im­pact on busi­ness­es, the in­vest­ment re­turns and the eco­nom­ic and so­cial out­comes re­alised.

The evolv­ing fi­nanc­ing land­scape

De­spite its short­com­ings, there have been some pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments in the non-tra­di­tion­al fi­nanc­ing space. IDB Lab’s CARIBEquity, Ig­nite the World project, ap­proved in No­vem­ber 2025, rep­re­sents a US$600,300 tech­ni­cal co­op­er­a­tion ini­tia­tive and US$300,000 in IDB Lab fi­nanc­ing. What is wel­com­ing about this ini­tia­tive is the in­te­gra­tion of men­tor­ship, net­work­ing and the de­vel­op­ment of skills; mak­ing star­tups bet­ter placed to achieveen­tre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess. An­oth­er IDB ini­tia­tive, Term Fi­nance SME TT, in­volves US$2 mil­lion in IDB Lab fi­nanc­ing and US$1 mil­lion in coun­ter­part fund­ing, cre­at­ing a US$3 mil­lion pro­gramme to ex­pand fi­nanc­ing for mi­cro, small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es.

In March 2026, the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank al­so ap­proved a US$10 mil­lion line of cred­it for De­vel­op­ment Fi­nance Lim­it­ed, to­geth­er with a US$126,000 grant for in­sti­tu­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing, to sup­port SMEs in pro­duc­tive sec­tors. The above are pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments to ex­pand the range of non-tra­di­tion­al fi­nanc­ing. It must how­ev­er be stat­ed that while SME lend­ing, grants and tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance com­ple­ment eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment, they do not re­place the ven­ture cap­i­tal that high growth en­ter­pris­es re­quire.

The IDB 2026 call for pro­pos­als for Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Funds, how­ev­er, seeks to in­vest in VC funds thar tar­get ear­ly-stage in­vest­ments in nascent sec­tors in­clud­ing Cli­matetech, Health, Edtech and Agtech.

What must T&T do

dif­fer­ent­ly this time?

Source of cap­i­tal - While gov­ern­ment and multi­na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions have con­tributed to es­tab­lish­ing the VC mar­ket, lo­cal pri­vate cap­i­tal par­tic­i­pa­tion should be en­cour­aged. Lo­cal pri­vate sec­tor par­tic­i­pa­tion re­flects con­fi­dence by lo­cal in­vestors in lo­cal start­up and scal­able busi­ness­es. The es­tab­lish­ment of VC funds ought not be a check list item of will­ing in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies with the sup­port of the gov­ern­ment.

In­vest­ment readi­ness- Busi­ness­es seek­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal should be in­vest­ment ready. En­tre­pre­neurs and those seek­ing to es­tab­lish funds must ac­cept that ven­ture cap­i­tal is not for every type of busi­ness. Ven­ture cap­i­tal is specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed at busi­ness­es that of­fer in­vestors above-av­er­age re­turns com­men­su­rate with the risk pro­file of the busi­ness. To en­tice an in­vestor busi­ness­es must en­sure good gov­er­nance, ex­cel­lent man­age­ment team, scal­able busi­ness mod­els, sound gov­er­nance, strong lead­er­ship, and demon­stra­ble mar­ket op­por­tu­ni­ties.

Ven­ture cap­i­tal is part of a broad­er fi­nan­cial sys­tem- Star­tups move through dis­tinct stage­sand use cap­i­tal for var­ied rea­sons, through­out the life cy­cle. Ven­ture cap­i­tal must be seen as one el­e­ment in the mix of fi­nanc­ing in­stru­ments avail­able to ad­dress SME fi­nanc­ing chal­lenges.

Fund Struc­ture, Man­age­ment and Men­tor­ship- A suc­cess­ful ven­ture cap­i­tal mar­ket de­pends on more than the pro­vi­sion of cap­i­tal. At­ten­tion must be paid to fund man­age­ment and struc­ture as this in­flu­ences source of funds, where cap­i­tal is chan­nelled, the mo­tive for so do­ing and the abil­i­ty to man­age the vary­ing risk pro­files of the in­vestee com­pa­nies, while en­sur­ing ad­e­quate re­turns. To op­ti­mise re­turns funds must pro­vide men­tor­ship, strate­gic sup­port, ac­cess to net­works, and ac­cess to mar­kets.

The en­try/ex­it re­la­tion­ship- The say­ing that en­try and ex­it are linked holds true. In­vestors are en­ticed to mo­bilise cap­i­tal where the po­ten­tial for re­turns is favourable, In­vestors com­pare dif­fer­ent as­set class­es and make de­ci­sions based on pro­ject­ed re­turns. The ease of ac­cess to in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties glob­al­ly, means in­vestors have ac­cess to a larg­er pool of in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties. This should be con­sid­ered giv­en T&T’s small mar­ket size, lim­it­ed high growth op­por­tu­ni­ties and lim­it­ed po­ten­tial for ex­it, the pri­ma­ry means through which in­vestors re­alise re­turns.

Mov­ing from promise to per­for­mance

A func­tion­ing VC ecosys­tem can sup­port in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ial ac­tiv­i­ties in agro­pro­cess­ing, tech­nol­o­gy, re­new­able en­er­gy, man­u­fac­tur­ing, cre­ative in­dus­tries, and tourism. These sec­tors present op­por­tu­ni­ties to gen­er­ate em­ploy­ment, in­crease ex­ports and cre­ate ad­di­tion­al sources of eco­nom­ic val­ue.

How­ev­er, en­tre­pre­neur­ship is not sim­ply about ac­cess to fi­nance. It in­volves sound lead­er­ship, in­no­va­tion, in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, op­por­tu­ni­ty recog­ni­tion, and the ca­pac­i­ty to trans­late ideas in­to com­mer­cial­ly vi­able en­ter­pris­es. A mul­ti-stake­hold­er ap­proach in­clud­ing gov­ern­ment, pri­vate sec­tor, fi­nan­cial and ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions is re­quired. The re­al test of the cur­rent ven­ture cap­i­tal push will be whether T&T learns from pre­vi­ous ini­tia­tives while draw­ing on best prac­tices in oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions.

The true mea­sure of suc­cess will not be how much cap­i­tal is promised or even mo­bilised, but on the num­ber of star­tups and en­ter­pris­es trans­formed and the eco­nom­ic and so­cial val­ue gen­er­at­ed.