Trench Town Just Ran Its First AI Camp, and Every Caribbean Teen Should Know Why It Matters

In its sixth year running, the Brightstar Coding and Robotics Rock! camp in Trench Town, Kingston added artificial intelligence to its curriculum for the first time this July. Secondary students from Jamaica College and Vauxhall High School spent two weeks programming small Robotis Mini robots, split across two skill tiers, one for first-timers and one for students returning from earlier years, according to the Jamaica Observer. The programme, run by Brightstar Lottery Jamaica with the Mona Geoinformatics Institute at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is free to attend.

That last detail carries weight well beyond Trench Town. Caribbean youth unemployment stood at 17.6 percent in 2024, more than three and a half times the 4.7 percent rate among adults 25 and older, according to the International Labour Organization's February 2026 report, A Generation in Transition: Rethinking Youth Employment in the Caribbean. A free camp teaching AI to teenagers in one of Kingston's most storied communities is not a side story next to that statistic. It is a small, working answer to a very large regional problem, and it is close to the exact model The Genius Project was built to run at scale.

What Actually Happened in Trench Town This Month

The camp itself is not new. This was the sixth year Brightstar Lottery Jamaica has partnered with the Mona Geoinformatics Institute to run Coding and Robotics Rock! at the Trench Town Development Committee's After School Advantage Centre. What changed in 2026 is the content. For the first time, organisers built AI training directly into the two-week schedule, alongside the coding and robotics work students had already come to expect, and split instruction into two levels so that a student picking up a keyboard for the first time and a student on their third or fourth summer were both working at the right pace.

Jayden Derby, a Jamaica College student in the programme, put the appeal in plain terms to the Jamaica Observer: the skills, he said, could be useful in his day-to-day life, not just in a classroom exercise. Zann Locke, the Trench Town Development Committee's acting president, made a different point that says just as much about demand. Adults in the community, she said, keep asking why there is no version of the camp for them. That is not a complaint about the programme. It is a community telling its organisers, out loud, that a free camp built for teenagers is undersized for the appetite around it.

Trench Town is not where most investor decks point when they talk about the Caribbean's AI future. It is one of Kingston's most historically significant neighbourhoods, known internationally through music long before it is known for technology. That is precisely why this detail matters. A model this specific, free, community-based, running for a sixth consecutive year, adding AI the moment its organisers judged students were ready for it, is evidence that the constraint on youth AI education was never interest or ability. It was access.

The Number That Explains Why This Matters

Read the Trench Town story next to the region's labour data and the stakes come into focus fast. The ILO's February 2026 report found Caribbean youth unemployment, excluding Haiti, at 17.6 percent in 2024, against 4.7 percent for adults aged 25 and over. Include Haiti in the count and the youth figure climbs to 30.5 percent. The same report found that 24 percent of Caribbean youth aged 15 to 24, again excluding Haiti, are not in employment, education, or training, a group economists label NEET, and one that young women fall into at 1.6 times the rate of young men.

A gap of that size does not close because a region wishes it away. It closes, if it closes at all, the way the Trench Town camp is trying to close it: by putting a specific, employable skill in front of a teenager years before the unemployment statistic would otherwise catch up with them. AI is one of the few skill areas growing faster than the job market can currently supply trained people for it, which makes early, free access to it one of the more direct levers a region actually has against a NEET rate this stubborn.

The Region Is Behind, and the Region Knows It

Trench Town's camp did not add AI training in a vacuum. It landed inside a region that is, by its own institutions' measurements, still catching up. A 2025 UNESCO survey of higher education institutions found that around 70 percent of universities in Europe and North America have or are developing formal guidance on AI use, compared with just 45 percent across Latin America and the Caribbean. That gap does not sit only at the university level. It shapes what a student walks into university already knowing, or not knowing, about a technology their coursework increasingly assumes they can use.

This is the same week the region's policymakers are trying to close that gap at the institutional level. On 23 and 24 July 2026, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, together with the University of the West Indies, St Augustine and its AI Innovation Centre, is hosting the inaugural Caribbean AI Forum, CAIF 2026, under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." Ministers, regulators, development partners, private sector leaders, academics, civil society, and youth delegates are meeting to launch the Caribbean AI Task Force's final report and push toward a coordinated regional AI strategy. Groups like the Caribbean AI Association track exactly this kind of regional policy movement, which matters because governance conversations at that level eventually decide what gets funded at the Trench Town level.

Free Is Not a Small Detail

It would be easy to read the Trench Town story as a nice community update and move on. That reading misses the actual argument. The World Bank and ILO data on Caribbean education spending consistently show governments allocating a small share of already tight budgets to the post-secondary and technical training that leads to AI-adjacent work. When public funding is this thin, whether a specific student gets trained in AI often comes down to whether a free programme happens to exist near them, not whether they have the ability or the drive to learn it.

The Genius Project exists to make that answer less dependent on geography. It is a tuition-free AI programme for Caribbean youth, sponsored by the Caribbean AI Association, AI Jamaica, and Maestro AI Labs, and funded through the philanthropy of Adrian Dunkley and StarApple AI, the first AI company founded in the Caribbean. No student pays a fee to take part, and the programme runs in person and virtually so a teenager in Bridgetown or Georgetown has the same access as a student a short walk from Trench Town.

What Building Actually Looks Like When a Teen Gets the Chance

A camp like this is not measured by attendance. It is measured by what students leave able to do that they could not do two weeks earlier. A student who can programme a small robot to respond to a sensor, or run a basic AI model against a real dataset, has crossed a line that matters more than any certificate: they have gone from someone who uses a tool someone else built to someone who understands, at least in miniature, how the tool works. That distinction is the entire premise behind The Genius Project's own curriculum, which pushes students past using AI tools and into building with them, on projects tied to problems they can see in their own communities.

It is also why community-rooted programmes tend to outperform generic online courses for this age group. A teenager who builds something inside a space they recognise, with a mentor from their own city, is more likely to keep going than one working through an anonymous video series alone. Trench Town's organisers clearly understand this. Splitting instruction by skill level, rather than running one generic curriculum for every student, is exactly the kind of design choice that keeps a returning student engaged instead of bored, and keeps a first-timer from feeling lost.

How to Get In, Even If You Are Nowhere Near Trench Town

The single most useful thing a Caribbean teenager can take from this story is that free, hands-on AI training is real, it is expanding, and it is not limited to one Kingston neighbourhood. The Genius Project accepts applications from across the Caribbean, in person and virtually, and it costs nothing to apply or to take part once accepted. Beyond that specific programme, AI Jamaica and the Caribbean AI Association both surface regional events, camps, and training opportunities worth watching as more institutions and community groups follow Trench Town's example.

None of this closes a 17.6 percent unemployment rate on its own, and nobody running these programmes claims it will. What it does is give an individual teenager a real, working answer to a question that statistic cannot answer for them: what should I actually go build, starting now, while the region's ministers and universities work out the policy side at their own pace. Trench Town's students did not wait for that policy to arrive before picking up a robot. Neither should anyone reading this.