Over 50 entrepreneurs are participating in a ‘Green Tech Start Up Bootcamp’ in order to present ideas to help mitigate climate change.
The activity, which is underway at the Fort Young Hotel, will take place from the 1st – 3rd of December and is being hosted by the Caribbean Climate Innovation Center (CCIC) in partnership with the National Development Foundation of Dominica (NDFD).
Dominica is the seventh country in the Caribbean to participate in the Green Tech Startup Bootcamp.
Project Manager of CCIC Carlinton Burrell, who was addressing the opening ceremony on Thursday, said the objective of the CCIC is to identify and support Caribbean entrepreneurs and new ventures that are developing locally-appropriate solutions to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
“We focus on building the clean green technology…,” he said. “This is achieved by implementing various programmes across the Caribbean such as the Green Tech Startup Bootcamp and accelerator programmes that is based in Jamaica.”
Burrell noted that the bootcamp is an electric one, bringing together small business owners, entrepreneurs, government officials and members of the academic community “to discuss the economic challenges being faced as a result of climate change and to identify promising business-related approaches to addressing these problems.”
According to Burrell, an event such as this is particularly valuable, “because it allows us to draw from a wide range of experiences and evidence.”
He encouraged participants to make the best use of the opportunities that is available right there at their fingertips.
Meantime, Executive Director of NDFD, Cletus Joseph said there is tremendous potential that can be identified with regards to green technology.
Quite often we are posed with challenges which threaten our abilities to achieve even the most basic necessities required for daily living, and just as often we concentrate so much on these challenges that we fail to see that there are opportunities which beckon onto us during these times,” he explained.
Joseph also pointed to the direction the organizers want the ‘Green Tech Start Up Bootcamp’ to go.
“Let us look at our surroundings, our situations and try to concentrate on the things that we can do to ensure that we overcome these,” he said. “This means that we are going to put our minds, hearts and brains into charting the cost to impact positively on the things which affects us and threatens our very existence, and the way that we know and how we do things.”
He added that each individual present can start by saying, “it starts with me and this is the challenge that we can pose to ourselves and when it starts getting tough, because we do not promise that it’s going to be an easy road.”
He continued, “We can also adopt the attitude and say, why not me and if not me, who?”
He urged entrepreneurs to combine their innovative spirits with their entrepreneurial spirits and generate those businesses, which can truly impact the issue of climate change.
“For those of us who still doubt, it is really real,” Joseph stated.
He said the NDFD, the CCIC and InforDev, a member of the World Bank Group, are presenting an opportunity that has many objectives.
“The opportunity to scan our environment and develop business ideas which can be innovative, sustainable and viable…We also provide serious networking with peers, other partners and experts from whom we can learn from their expertise and experiences.”
According to Joseph the participants of the bootcamp will also get a chance to win cash.
Jamaica, Trinidad &Tobago, Saint Lucia, Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados and Belize are the other Caribbean countries that have already participated in the Green Tech Startup Bootcamp.
Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change actually admitted during a news conference this month that the real goal of all the climate change propaganda is to kill off capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres stated.