A 24-Year-Old Told CARICOM What Caribbean Youth Want From AI, and the Numbers Back Him Up

Caribbean heads of government spent four days in Castries, from July 5 to 8, arguing about trade, climate financing, and regional integration under the theme "From Resilience to Renewal in a Changing World." Then, on the morning of the opening ceremony, a 24-year-old law graduate stood up and told them what none of that would matter without: a plan for what happens to young people as artificial intelligence reshapes the region's economy.

It would be easy to read that as one more youth slot on a summit programme, the kind of five-minute appearance that gets a polite round of applause and then no follow-up. What happened instead is that the speech landed in the middle of a genuinely active few weeks for Caribbean AI: a regional policy roadmap, an exam-board rule change, and the region's largest AI gathering to date all moved in roughly the same window. Whether or not CARICOM leaders act on any single line of the speech, the surrounding activity is real, and it is where the actual opportunity for young people sits.

Rahym R. Augustin-Joseph is not a delegate. He is a youth advocate, invited to speak at the opening of the 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM on July 8, 2026, under the theme "From Resilience to Renewal in a Changing World." What he said cut through the usual language of summit communiqués. "Let us develop a Caribbean strategy on Artificial Intelligence that invests in digital skills, safeguards our people, protects our data, supports Caribbean entrepreneurship, and ensures that technology serves humanity," he told the assembled prime ministers, adding that the region cannot afford to simply consume technology built somewhere else.

Who Actually Said This, and Why It Carries Weight

Augustin-Joseph is not a random voice with a microphone. He finished a Bachelor of Laws with first class honours at UWI Cave Hill, was named Rhodes Scholar for the Commonwealth Caribbean in the class of 2025, and is heading to Oxford for postgraduate study. Before any of that, he was Programme Director of the Saint Lucia National Youth Council, Chairperson of the National Youth Parliament, and a youth representative on the National Reparations Commission. He has carried the youth voice into the UNESCO Youth Forum, the CARICOM Youth Summit, and the Caribbean Youth Leaders Summit, and he writes a weekly column, "As I See It," in the St Lucia Times.

That background matters because it is the opposite of a token youth slot. When he told CARICOM leaders not to let the region become a passive consumer of AI, he was speaking from years inside the exact institutions the region already has for youth policy, which makes the ask harder to file away as a nice sentiment and move on.

The Numbers That Make His Point for Him

The case for urgency does not need embellishing. The Caribbean Development Bank's Caribbean Economic Review and Outlook for 2024-2025 puts youth unemployment at roughly 20% in Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados, close to 18% in the Bahamas and Jamaica, and around 15% in Trinidad and Tobago and Belize, even as national unemployment has dropped to single digits across most of these same countries. In Belize, Jamaica, Grenada, the Bahamas, and Barbados, the gap between the youth rate and the national rate now runs past 10 percentage points.

A separate ILO analysis of the region, excluding Haiti, put youth unemployment at 17.6% in 2024 against 4.7% for adults aged 25 and over, a gap of nearly four to one. The same analysis flagged that the share of young people not in employment, education, or training reversed a years-long decline in 2024 and is expected to keep rising. Those two numbers, taken together, are the actual argument behind Augustin-Joseph's speech. A youth strategy built around AI is not a forward-looking extra. It is a response to a labour market that is already failing young Caribbean people at nearly four times the rate it fails everyone else.

The Speech Was Not the Only Thing Happening That Week

Two days after Castries, the conversation moved to Bridgetown. Future Caribbean, a young initiative built around open-source agentic AI and entrepreneurship, held its inaugural Agentic AI Assembly on July 10-12 at the Inter-American Development Bank's Barbados office, streamed live with satellite locations across the region. In the six weeks after its Global Open-Source Agentic AI Buildathon launched, close to 700 builders, founders, investors, advisors, and ecosystem partners had signed on, working through technical sessions and live build sprints on AI agents for finance, energy, healthcare, tourism, and climate resilience. Finals are scheduled for the New York Stock Exchange later in 2026.

Lily Dash, founder of Future Caribbean and co-founder of ACTAI Advisors, is leading it alongside Steven Echtman of ClawCamp, with backing from partners including NYSE, IDB Invest, ACTAI Global, Cayman Enterprise City, and Export Barbados. None of it required a CARICOM mandate to happen. It happened because a group of people decided Barbados was a credible place to build AI companies, and then built the infrastructure to prove it. For a Caribbean teenager watching from a phone in Kingston, Port of Spain, or Georgetown, that is the part worth sitting with: the request Augustin-Joseph made to heads of government and the thing already underway in Bridgetown are pointing at the same door.

The Policy Piece Is Already Moving Too

Regional AI policy did not wait for the summit either. Earlier in July, the UNESCO Office for the Caribbean presented its Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap at the 126th Special Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development, with member states endorsing it. The Caribbean AI Forum, a new gathering of ministers, ICT regulators, development partners, and youth representatives, is set for July 23-24. And on the exam side, the Caribbean Examinations Council confirmed that AI is now permitted in CSEC, CAPE, and CCSLC school-based assessments from 2026, under rules that allow AI for ideation and enhancement but not for generating full submissions. CXC Registrar Dr Wayne Wesley put the caveat plainly: "if students are not literate and numerate, they will not harness the power of AI," a reminder that the tools reward students who already have the fundamentals, not ones looking for a shortcut.

Entrepreneurship, Not Just Employment

Augustin-Joseph's list did not stop at digital skills. He specifically named Caribbean entrepreneurship, and that framing matters. A region where roughly one in five young people cannot find formal work does not solve its problem by training more candidates for a fixed number of jobs. It solves the problem, at least partly, by producing young people who create work, for themselves and for others. That is the same argument this site has made before: the Caribbean's next major AI company is more likely to be built by someone under 25 in Kingston or Bridgetown than imported from outside the region. Communities like AI Barbados exist for exactly this reason, giving young builders in one of the region's smaller markets a direct line to mentors, events, and each other, rather than leaving them to figure out the AI economy alone.

The Genius Bootcamp, Code Caribbean, and Creative AI programmes run by The Genius Project sit in the same lane. They are not curriculum add-ons. They are structured routes from zero AI background to a portfolio a university admissions officer or an employer can actually look at, built by Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, and the region's most cited AI voice. The programmes exist specifically because policy roadmaps and summit speeches, however well argued, do not by themselves teach a sixteen-year-old how to build an agent or ship a small product. Somebody still has to do that part.

What "Investing in Digital Skills" Actually Requires

Augustin-Joseph's four-part ask sounds tidy in a speech: digital skills, data protection, entrepreneurship, technology that serves people. Turning it into something a fifteen-year-old in Vieux Fort or a nineteen-year-old in Spanish Town can use is harder, and it depends on three things happening in parallel rather than in sequence. Curriculum has to catch up, which is already underway through the CXC assessment change. Connectivity and device access have to widen, since a digital skills strategy means nothing to a student sharing one phone with three siblings. And mentorship has to exist outside the classroom, because a syllabus update alone does not teach a student how to actually ship a project. Regional governments control the first two. Organisations already working in the space, from AI Barbados to The Genius Project, are the ones filling the third gap right now, without waiting for a ministry memo.

What This Actually Means for You This Summer

If you are a Caribbean student or recent graduate reading this, the practical takeaway is not "wait for CARICOM to finish a policy." It is that the door Augustin-Joseph described is being propped open from multiple directions at once, and doors like that do not stay wide for long. A few concrete moves worth making before September:

Pick one AI skill and go deep rather than skimming five tools. Build something small this month: a script, a chatbot for a church group, an automation for a family business, anything that produces a link you can show someone. That single finished thing does more for a university application or a job interview than a list of courses you audited but never applied. Follow what comes out of the Caribbean AI Forum on July 23-24 rather than only the headline coverage; regional policy gatherings like this often publish resource lists and funding calls that never make the news cycle. If entrepreneurship is the route that interests you more than employment, look at what Future Caribbean's buildathon model proved in six weeks: a clear brief, a deadline, and a community of peers can move a beginner from idea to working prototype faster than a semester of self-study.

And if you want structure instead of guessing, apply to a programme built for exactly this moment. Genius Bootcamp, Code Caribbean, and Creative AI are free, Caribbean-specific, and run by mentors who understand the region's connectivity constraints and job market, not a generic online course written for a different economy. Applications and full details are at beagenius.org.

None of this requires permission from a summit. Augustin-Joseph's speech and the Bridgetown assembly both prove the same point from opposite directions: the region's AI moment is not something that happens to Caribbean youth from a podium in Castries. It is something a growing number of them are already building, with or without a finished regional strategy, and the young people who start now will simply have a longer head start than the ones still waiting for a ministry to move first.