Plan to transform services into export-driven agency

A plan to reposition the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries (BCSI) as a central engine of export growth, with a two-year target to significantly expand the global reach of local professionals, has been outlined by Minister of Business Development Kerrie Symmonds amid declining foreign aid. 

Minister of Energy, Business Development and Commerce Kerrie Symmonds. (Photo Credit: Ricardo Roberts/Barbados TODAY)

Addressing service industry figures at the BCSI’s Council of Leaders meeting in Warrens, Symmonds revealed that the move is a direct response to a changing geopolitical landscape where traditional international development cooperation has declined.

To counter these external pressures, Symmonds’s roadmap focuses heavily on building long-term structural resilience by shifting the BCSI’s mandate from basic business advocacy to direct commercial execution.

“The roadmap would include a few things,” Symmonds outlined. “One, there has to be a capacity for us to predict and to plan, but we can’t predict and plan very easily in this global season because the global circumstances are changing every single day.”

To navigate this volatility, the second pillar of the roadmap demands a total shift in the institutional proof of concept for the organisation. Symmonds challenged the BCSI leadership to fundamentally reconceive their everyday mission to focus on market outcomes rather than administrative support.

“There’s got to be a concept, a proof of concept. We have to move from business support, as I said, to aggressive execution, and that really means that the BCSI has to reconceive its mission,” Symmonds declared. “You are now excellent at business support, but really and truly, you are not executors. You’re not the executing agency that I believe you have the capacity to be.”

The minister committed to providing the necessary legislative intervention and financial backing to secure this transition, using a pending cabinet paper to codify the new operational framework.

The third pillar of the roadmap focuses on reshaping the policy architecture of the local services sector to bridge the gap between theoretical market access and actual foreign exchange earnings.

While Barbados holds extensive duty-free and quota-free access under various bilateral treaties, the minister noted that these agreements remain heavily underutilised. The roadmap charges the BCSI with the responsibility of mapping local capacity and aggressively preparing businesses for international trade.

“It is going to be necessary for us to reshape the policy architecture,” Symmonds explained. “We have to identify the productive capacity in our services sector. And again, there’s no entity better placed than the coalition of service industries to do this… We have to come to that point where we are, as I said, in a position to identify the domestic productive capacity first of all, and then secondly, move that domestic productive capacity to a point of export readiness.”

According to the roadmap, export readiness will require local service providers to meet stringent international specifications.

“By export readiness, I mean ability to meet technical standards which are required internationally for our export of service to cross the border and get into somebody else’s marketplace,” Symmonds said. “We need to know the technical standards. We need to know the industrial specs, the specifics, what is required, and in every area of our activity economically, this is something that we have to be mapping out now.”

Setting a strict timeline for the strategy, the minister established a two-year evaluation window to measure the tangible cross-border movement of Barbadian professionals, whether travelling physically or delivering services digitally.

“If we could agree on this journey, I would like for us within two years to be able to come back and take stock and say, look, this is where we are,” Symmonds proposed. “We know exactly what these practitioners are doing and we have worked with these practitioners and we can safely say that 90 per cent of them now are in a position where they could cross borders and supply their services in any of the modes of supply recognized internationally.”

The fourth pillar of the strategy relies on national socialisation, ensuring that the wider public redefines its understanding of entrepreneurial scale. Symmonds emphasised that local businesses can no longer limit their focus to the domestic market of 260 000 people when access to the wider Caribbean region and European markets exists.

“The scale now has to be larger and it must be that you are sending a message that says today we have passive enjoyment of duty free and quota-free access to multiple markets around the world,” the minister urged. “But tomorrow we will have the capacity to deliver and to turn promise into profit, and that’s not a difficult message. You want to be able to tell people the market access is there, but we are now taking you to a point where you’re turning the promise of potential into real profit.”

A major operational priority within the roadmap is for the BCSI to act as the primary interlocutor to harmonise professional standards, licensing requirements and ethical benchmarks with international bodies, particularly within the European Union’s Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). (RR)

Symmonds stressed that completing mutual recognition agreements is vital to eliminate the costly redundancy of recertification for local accountants, engineers and lawyers seeking to expand into foreign capitals.

Reiterating his desire for an unvarnished partnership with the private sector, Symmonds urged immediate engagement from stakeholders to refine the strategy:”I really feel we have to build this together because if we can get this right… we can make the service sector of Barbados the driving engine of a new but diversified economy in this country.”

Stakeholders in the service sector attending the BCSI Council of Leaders Meeting. (Photo Credit: Ricardo Roberts/Barbados TODAY)

(RR)