SOYI­NI GREY

Trinidad and To­ba­go should be us­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic to rev­o­lu­tionise its econ­o­my.

That’s the as­sess­ment of Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vice In­dus­tries (TTC­SI), Vashti Guyadeen.

Quot­ing a for­mer UK Prime Min­is­ter, Win­ston Churchill, Vashti Guyadeen says we should not waste a good cri­sis, and we need to cast an eye over­seas to learn from the suc­cess­es of oth­ers.

“We can draw from the ex­am­ple of oth­er coun­tries,” she said.  “South Ko­rea is an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple in terms of how they have de­signed their eco­nom­ic deal for post-pan­dem­ic de­vel­op­ment.  Many of its mea­sures are fo­cussed on the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of mi­cro and small busi­ness­es, and al­so are en­cour­ag­ing the green­ing of firms.”

The TTC­SI CEO says some of her mem­bers are pre­pared to op­er­ate their busi­ness­es pri­ori­tis­ing dig­i­tal de­liv­ery and the green­ing of their op­er­a­tions.

She al­so says TTC­SI is ready to place the is­sue on the front burn­er na­tion­al­ly, be­cause the coun­try needs to get things right. But, she says, some busi­ness­es have grabbed avail­able op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“There are some sec­tors where COVID-19 has been a bless­ing in dis­guise, mean­ing that they have been able to use tech­nol­o­gy to ex­pand their busi­ness­es, and I am speak­ing specif­i­cal­ly about the Busi­ness and Pro­fes­sion­al Ser­vices Sec­tor,” she ex­plains.

“Our ap­proach has been to look at sec­tors that have been able to grow with­in this one-and-a-half-year time frame and find out what we can do to ac­cel­er­ate their growth.  We are push­ing a strong ‘go glob­al’ cam­paign for sec­tors that have been able to piv­ot,” she added.

Guyadeen says 140 of their mem­bers re­cent­ly grad­u­at­ed from the “Ser­vices Go Glob­al: Car­i­fo­rum Work­shop”, which builds the ca­pac­i­ty of ser­vice providers to cap­i­talise on the Car­i­fo­rum Eco­nom­ic Part­ner­ship Agree­ment, the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and oth­er trade agree­ments.