Last week I participated in the Novatech/Caribbean conference in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) organized by Pro-Invest/Novatech. Nearly 300 participants, representing firms, government agencies, investors, regulators, as well as bi-lateral and multilateral donor organizations attended the conference.
The main aim of the event was to facilitate business contacts among participants, many of them from the Caribbean and from Europe. The organizers even set-up a platform, which allowed participants to schedule bi-lateral meetings beforehand. The ICT application was certainly nice and useful, but I sense that some of the best contacts were established through old fashion informal networking. Fortunately enough, the schedule and the venue left enough opportunities to meet other attendants. In any case, from perspective of "matchmaking", I consider the event a real success. Kudos to the organizers and the European Union, which funded the event.
We had also some interesting presentations and debates on topics such as innovation, regulatory reform, ICT financing and human resources. The program is here.
I am pretty upbeat about the prospects of ICT investments in the Caribbean region: regulatory reform in telecommunications is under way in most countries and new entrants are bringing much-needed competition to the market. Most of all new submarine cables will, in certain countries, break the monopoly on Internet connection and allow for much wider distribution of access services. However, this view should be tempered by the acknowledgment made by José Rafaél Vargas, President of Indotel (the regulatory agency for the Dominican Republic) who stated that at 10% user penetration Internet access is still a privilege in his country .
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