The Caribbean Just Held Its First AI Forum. Trench Town Teens Were Already Building

The Caribbean held its first regional AI forum in Trinidad on July 23 and 24, 2026, producing a five-point policy report on AI governance and literacy. The same week, a free two-week camp in Trench Town, Kingston had teenagers building real AI and robotics projects on programmable robots. The literacy the report says the region needs to build was already running in a classroom two hundred miles away.

On July 23, government ministers, telecom regulators, university researchers and a scatter of youth delegates filed into a lecture theatre at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad. They were there for something the Caribbean had never held before: a dedicated regional AI forum. Two hundred miles north, at a community centre in Trench Town, Kingston, a group of teenagers were finishing week two of a robotics and AI camp that did not wait for anyone's report to tell them to start.

Both things happened in the same July. Only one of them had 15-year-olds soldering wires and training a model before lunch.

What Actually Happened in Trinidad

The 1st Caribbean AI Forum, CAIF 2026, ran on July 23 and 24 under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." It was organised by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union with UWI's St Augustine campus and its Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, and it pulled in a genuinely wide room: Jaya Ramoutar from Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Public Administration and Artificial Intelligence, CTU deputy secretary-general Nigel Cassimire, UWI campus principal Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, and diplomats from France and China, alongside academics, private-sector leaders and youth representatives.

The forum's headline output was the Caribbean AI Task Force report, known as CAITF, chaired by Dr Craig Ramlal, who also directs the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre. "The Caribbean cannot afford to remain on the sidelines of the AI revolution," Ramlal told the room, arguing that the region has the scale to build harmonised policy if it moves as a bloc rather than fourteen separate small markets. The report lands on five priorities: regional AI governance, data sovereignty and digital infrastructure, innovation and industry development, human capacity and AI literacy, and sustained multi-stakeholder engagement.

Read that fourth priority again. Human capacity and AI literacy. It is a fair thing for a regional task force to name as unfinished business. It is also, as it turns out, already well underway in at least one part of Kingston that the forum's own report is trying to describe.

While Trinidad Was Naming the Problem, Trench Town Was Solving It

Brightstar Lottery Jamaica's Coding and Robotics Rock! camp turned six this year. It is a free, two-week programme that runs every July, and in 2026 it operated simultaneously at sites in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Sint Maarten. One of its Jamaican locations was Trench Town's After School Advantage Centre, a community building Brightstar Lottery Jamaica retrofitted and reopened in 2025.

The camp is run in partnership with the Mona Geoinformatics Institute at UWI Mona, and its lead tutor this year, MGI software developer Ryan Cooper, split the cohort by experience: a beginner track and a returning-student track, both new for 2026. Campers worked hands-on with Robotis Mini programmable robots, building and coding machines rather than reading about how machines get built. Jamaica College student Jayden Derby, one of the participants, put the stakes plainly: computers, he said, are taking over the world, and he would rather understand them than be run by them. Vauxhall High School's Sherekel Walker described the camp simply as advancing what she already knew about computers.

Zann Locke, acting president of the Trench Town Community Development Committee, said adult residents had started asking for a version of the same programme for themselves after watching what the teenagers were doing. That is not a small detail. A camp aimed at teenagers had spilled over into a community wanting the same literacy for its own working adults.

The Literacy Gap the Report Wants to Close Is Smaller Than It Sounds

It would be easy to read CAIF's fourth priority, human capacity and AI literacy, and picture a region starting from zero. The numbers say otherwise. Research presented by Professor Paul Golding and lecturer Tiou Clarke at the University of Technology, Jamaica's AI Symposium in May 2026 found that 96 percent of Jamaican high school students and 100 percent of university and college students surveyed already use AI tools for academic work. Around 87 percent of faculty use AI to prepare their own classes.

That is not a literacy gap in the sense of students who have never touched the technology. It is a gap between students already using AI daily and a curriculum, an assessment system, and now a regional task force still working out how to respond. The Caribbean does not need to convince its teenagers to adopt AI. It needs to catch up to what they have already adopted, and give them the judgement to use it well rather than just the access to use it at all.

Does a Seat at the Table Actually Change Anything?

Youth representatives were named among CAIF's stakeholders alongside ministers and diplomats, and the CAITF report frames capacity-building for young people as a named priority rather than an afterthought. That matters. Regional policy has a long history of being written about young people without a single one of them in the room.

But a seat is not a build. The stronger case that Caribbean youth are shaping this moment sits in Trench Town, in Trinidad, in Saint Kitts and Nevis, and in Sint Maarten, wherever a Coding and Robotics Rock! site ran this July, and in programmes like The Genius Project that hand a teenager an actual project rather than a chair in an audience. Policy sets the boundary lines. Camps and cohorts are where the actual skill gets made.

What If Your School Was Not on Either List

Most Caribbean students were not at UWI St Augustine on July 23, and most were not in Trench Town either. If your school is not one of the handful of sites Brightstar Lottery Jamaica can reach in a single July, or your government has not yet sent a delegate to a regional forum, the practical question is not "when will this reach me." It is "what can I start this week."

Three things do not require a national policy to exist first. A student can pick one small, real problem, something in their own school, parish, or family, and try to solve a piece of it with a free AI tool, the same way the UTech numbers show most of them are already doing for homework. A parent can ask what their child's school actually allows and forbids around AI use in writing, since that policy usually already exists even where a regional one does not. And a family anywhere in the Caribbean can register for a free, structured programme built specifically for this, rather than picking up AI skills only through whichever app happens to be open on a phone.

Where This Leaves a Student Right Now

Behind The Genius Project sits StarApple AI, the first AI company built in the Caribbean, founded by Adrian Dunkley, a name that keeps coming up wherever the region argues about what AI education should look like in practice rather than on a slide. That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when someone treats "build it, do not wait for permission" as an actual operating principle rather than a slogan.

A regional forum and a five-point report are genuinely useful. Harmonised governance, shared data rules, and a real regional voice on AI are worth having, and Trinidad's ministers deserve credit for getting the first one of these off the ground. But nothing about that timeline requires a Caribbean teenager to wait. The camp in Trench Town did not need the CAITF report to exist before it ran a second AI track this year. It just ran one. That is the model worth copying: pick the project, build it, then let the policy catch up to what already works.

Put the two rooms side by side and the lesson is not that policy is pointless. It is that policy and building are different jobs, running on different clocks, and a fifteen-year-old only needs one of them to start today.