OP-ED: Growth Is Not Enough. The Caribbean Needs a Push That Reaches Everyone.

By Prof. C. Justin Robinson: Pro Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal of The University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus, Antigua and Barbuda

In January 2023, Governor Timothy Antoine of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank stood before the ECCU on the Bank’s fortieth anniversary and asked a deceptively simple question, what would it take to double the size of our economies over the next decade? He called it the Big Push! Two years on, with the ECCB having formalized that ambition into its 2026-2031 Strategic Plan under the banner of Collective Action for Shared Prosperity, the region owes itself an honest answer, not applause, not cynicism, but the clear-eyed reckoning that the moment demands.

This series is offered not as a set of answers but as an invitation to a conversation the Eastern Caribbean must have, urgently, honestly, and with the full breadth of its people in the room. It is written in solidarity with the ECCB’s ambition and in a serious refusal to pretend that ambition alone, or growth alone, is sufficient. The Caribbean has known periods of growth before. What it has not yet produced is growth that reaches the young man with no formal employment, the woman navigating an economy not designed for her, the community that watches prosperity arrive and depart without stopping. Growth that does not do those things is not transformation. It is rearrangement.

The old liberal world order has collapsed. No one in Washington, Brussels, or Beijing is designing its replacement with us in mind. Each will arrive with terms. The question is whether we are rule-setters or rule-takers.

The world has changed and not in our favour

The liberal international order that provided the backdrop for Caribbean development since the end of the Cold War is being dismantled in real time. China is here as a serious development partner; the Gulf states are arriving through sovereign wealth investments in Caribbean assets; the United States operates through security frameworks that condition aid on compliance. No one is coming to save us on our terms. The choice is not between engagement and isolation it is a choice between shaping the terms of engagement and accepting them. In the current context, The Big Push is not merely a development strategy, it is a survival and sovereignty strategy.

Growth is necessary but it is not enough

Dwayne, 24, in Kingstown, St. Vincent, has completed secondary school and two short vocational courses. He has applied for 47 formal jobs in three years. He received three interviews and zero offers. He now drives a taxi he does not own, earning EC$150 on a good week, EC$40 on a bad one. He is not counted as unemployed, the survey classified him as “self-employed, informal.” The official GDP figures include the fare he collects. They do not include the fact that he has no pension, no health insurance, no pathway to credit, and no reason to believe the economy will ever need him. Dwayne is not a statistic, he is the test. If the Big Push cannot change his conditions, it has failed no matter how many decimal points the growth rate adds.

This series pushes further than the growth target and asks, double for whom? Between 2000 and 2019, the OECS posted growth in most years. Yet male participation in tertiary education fell steadily, youth unemployment remained stubbornly high, and energy import bills drained household budgets. The informal economy expanded not because people preferred informality but because the formal economy offered no serious alternative. Growth without direction is like rain without roots, it runs off before it can nourish.

What the Big Push must target, explicitly and measurably, is growth across four dimensions simultaneously. First, male inclusion in the formal economy, not as a political gesture but as an economic necessity. A region losing a significant portion of one gender to violence, informality, and emigration operates at a fraction of its productive potential. Second, gender equity in access, ownership, and leadership because the evidence is unambiguous that broader participation makes economies grow faster and distribute better. Third, sustainability because an economy built on fossil fuels in a region of intensifying hurricanes and bleaching reefs is not building wealth, it is borrowing against a future it is simultaneously destroying. Fourth, economic sovereignty, the capacity to make choices about development on our own terms, not the terms of whoever arrives with capital. These four dimensions are not competing priorities they are the same priority viewed from four angles. The three pillars of this series, sports, creative industries, renewable energy, were chosen precisely because each address all four simultaneously.

The question tourism must answer

Any honest conversation about Eastern Caribbean transformation must ask what the dominant industry owes the Big Push. The Eastern Caribbean is one of the cruise capitals of the world. Millions of visitors pass through our waters annually, generating revenue that flows overwhelmingly to foreign-headquartered companies. The linkages to local economies, through food, craft, culture, and professional services, remain thinner than they should be after decades of effort. Can international hotel chains develop genuine career pathways from entry-level to management and ownership for Caribbean people? Can the tourism sector lead the renewable energy transition that would reduce its own costs while relieving the import burden on every household on these islands? These are not rhetorical questions they are the opening of a negotiation the Caribbean has been too deferential to start.

The implementation deficit we must name

There is a pattern in Caribbean development this series would be dishonest to ignore. Excellent frameworks are produced, launched at conferences, endorsed by governments, and filed alongside the previous excellent framework. The gap between Caribbean policy and Caribbean practice is not a gap of intelligence or ambition, it is a gap of accountability. The Big Push will join that graveyard unless it is accompanied by an accountability architecture as serious as the analytical one: public dashboards tracking metrics quarterly, parliamentary debate requirements, and independent civil society audit mechanisms with the standing to report publicly when implementation falls short. Without them, the conversation ahead will end the same way too many Caribbean conversations have ended, with a communiqué, a commemoration, and very little change.

An invitation, not a verdict

The pieces that follow are not written by someone in possession of all the answers. They are written by someone who believes, on the basis of evidence rather than sentiment, that the conditions producing Caribbean underperformance can be changed. What questions should we be asking that we are not? Which communities are missing from this conversation? What does the tourism sector need to hear, and what does it need to say, for this partnership to become real? These questions cannot be answered by this series alone. They require the churches, the trade unions, the diaspora organizations, the young man on the training ground, and the woman running a mas camp on credit, all of them at the table, and all of them treated as architects, not audiences.

No one is coming to build this for us on our terms. But if we build it together, with the honesty this moment demands, it might finally be built to last. So let us measure carefully and then, together, let us make a big push.

Next in the series: Sport as an industry.  Tune into the ECCB’s 10th Annual Growth and Resilience Dialogue — Big Push Conference, April 22–24, 2026.

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