Editor’s Letter

In August 2025, a team of software developers at iGovTT — public servants, working inside a government agency, in Port of Spain, Trinidad — launched Anansi. They built it almost entirely in-house. It is an AI-powered national digital assistant that connects 32 government ministries into a single intelligent platform, trained on over 7,000 frequently asked questions, available to every citizen 24 hours a day. The Minister of Public Administration stood at the launch and said the quiet part out loud: that the achievement speaks to "the wealth of talent and human capital that we have."

He was right. And that sentence contains both the opportunity and the failure of how we talk about Caribbean technology.

"The talent is here. It has always been here. The question this magazine was created to ask — and to answer, with evidence, issue by issue — is whether the conditions exist for that talent to be used, retained, led well, and turned into outcomes that matter for the region."

Whether the boardrooms are ready. Whether the governance frameworks are keeping pace. Whether the organisations making digital investments are making them wisely. Whether the next generation entering the technology workforce has somewhere worth going in the Caribbean, and not just somewhere better overseas.

These are not abstract questions. They are the most consequential leadership questions our region faces right now.

In 2025, T&T signed a €3 million grant agreement with the European Union and the Development Bank of Latin America to fund a national electronic ID, a public data interoperability platform, and a dedicated Tier-4 government data centre. We won the GSMA Government Leadership Award 2024 for regulatory excellence in digital policy. The IDB signed an agreement to support a government cloud and national digital transformation programme. iGovTT launched the Caribbean's first fully paperless online driver's permit renewal system in April 2025.

These are not small things. They are signals that something is being built — deliberately, with real institutional commitment, at a pace that exceeds what most of our neighbours have managed.

And yet. Three in every five Caribbean organisations with a digital transformation strategy are behind on executing it. The Digicel Business survey of 2,500 regional companies tells us that systems not being properly integrated, key resources being consumed by operational demands, and inadequate senior-level focus are the top three barriers to progress. The IDB's 2025 cybersecurity maturity assessment found that in about half of Caribbean/CARICOM countries assessed, at least one dimension of cyber capability is still at the lowest stage.

"This is where Caribbean Technology Review is positioned. Not in the space of announcement and aspiration. In the space between what is being promised and what is being delivered."

 Every article in this first issue is grounded in real data, named organisations, and verifiable facts. We will not produce vendor-led content dressed as editorial. We will not congratulate organisations for announcements that have not yet become outcomes.

 The digital future of Trinidad and Tobago will not be built by strategy documents or grant agreements or regulatory frameworks, important as all of those are. It will be built by the people in the room when a board decides how seriously to take cyber risk. By the CIO who chooses to sequence AI adoption thoughtfully rather than chase the latest vendor demo. By the government developer who builds something like Anansi from scratch because the talent was there and the mandate was given.

 Those people deserve a publication that takes them seriously. This is that publication.

Welcome to Issue 1.