On Tuesday 15 March, members of various youth organizations, particularly clients of the Anguilla Get Set Entrepreneurial Programme participated in an Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) sponsored Crowd Funding workshop. It was held at the Anguilla Community College.
OECS representative from the Competitive Business Unit (CBU), Donna Athanaze said: “An initiative that came from the OECS diagnostic review was access to funding in terms of crowd funding. This crowd funding initiative started last year when we had representatives from various aspects of the business sector enterprises attend a two day E-Payments Forum. This included Ministers of Trade/ Foreign Affairs, Legal Affairs; a senior representative from Visa and members of small and medium size enterprises (SME’s). This activity happened in St. Lucia and we also had representatives from the regional banks”.
She noted that because Anguilla, Montserrat and Tortola were not part of the initial workshop, it was decided that a one day forum would be held in all OECS member countries and open to small and medium size enterprises as well as young entrepreneurs. The workshop was geared towards youths, particularly those engaged in business projects or developing project ideas; those studying Business, Creative Arts, Tourism, Agriculture & Manufacturing and ICT related subjects at the various tertiary level institutions in the OECS islands
The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Competitive Business Unit (OECS-CBU) partnered with VisionFunder to carry out the initiative. Ms. Joyanne Headly of VisionFunder said “We believe that crowd funding is important in helping small business and young entrepreneurs to leverage resources in order to advance their programming”. She noted that it is estimated that about $34 Billion was raised via crowd funding, although, the Caribbean represented less than 0.1% of the monies raised from that source.
In January, 2016, the OECS-CBU called for young entrepreneurs from various sectors in the OECS to indicate their interest in attending the Crowd Funding training exercise. This was part of the Dominican-based Competitive Business Unit’s youth driven approach. It was proposed that a series of nineteen one-day training workshops for young entrepreneurs be conducted in the OECS territories during the months of February to April 2016, to raise awareness of the dynamics of raising funds through innovative online platforms, including crowd funding. The workshop was geared towards empowering young entrepreneurs to raise funds for various business projects.
Funding has been provided under the 10th European Development Fund (EDF).
