An Education Needs Assessment of CARIFORUM Firms

•

Supply-chain management skills

Value-chain development

• Key skills outside the exporting sector that contribute to the sector’s success, e.g., for food-processing: agronomy, food safety and logistics management skills

Source: ILO (2021)

Latin America and the Caribbean have demonstrated weak levels of international integration and

limited participation in GVCs compared to other regions (Rocha and Ruta 2022). The

competitiveness of firms influences participation in GVCs, and several skills-related factors limit CARIFORUM firms’ competitiveness which hinders their participation in GVCs. 5 For example,

access to finance is a significant constraint. Among the factors limiting Caribbean SMEs' access

to finance is their limited ability to create clear, comprehensive, and compelling business plans

supported by economically viable financial projections (Cowen et al. 2022). Skilled labour is also

limited, with several CARIFORUM states lagging compared to other economies with similar per

capita in terms of education and skills matching with the private sector (Acevedo, Borensztein and

Lennon 2019). This contributes to the region’s low productivity levels, w ith firms identifying an

inadequately educated workforce as the most severe obstacle to improving performance (Valencia

2020). Low productivity has been cited as a limitation of Caribbean export ers/countries’ ability to

exploit trade opportunities (Valencia 2020). Effective technology use and information on foreign

markets also hinder the region’s GVC participation. According to M cLean and Charles (2020), the

lack of expertise or the resources needed to conduct or to outsource market research/intelligence

has been a constraint to increasing exports for several CARIFORUM countries. Additionally,

despite the 82.33% of the Caribbean's workforce that has an advanced education (CAIPA 2022), a

large part of the labour force is not equipped to use high-level knowledge or technology in the

production system. The case study below highlights some of these challenges (see Text Box 2).

5 Note that there are several non-skills related factors that limit the competitiveness of CARIFORUM firms, but focus is attributed to skills related factors for the purpose of this study.

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