CARICOM Endorsed a Region-Wide AI Roadmap on July 7. Jamaica's Own National AI Policy Still Isn't Written

TL;DR

• On 7 July 2026, CARICOM's COTED-ICT endorsed the UNESCO Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap at its 126th Special Meeting, a framework built on consultations with more than 1,000 stakeholders across the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean.
• Jamaica's own National AI Task Force formed in 2023, delivered Policy Recommendations in 2024, and completed a UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment on 1 April 2026 with input from nearly 200 Jamaicans, but its National AI Policy is still in draft with no announced Cabinet timeline.
• A regional roadmap sets shared direction; it carries no legislative force inside any individual CARICOM member state, which still has to draft, consult, and pass its own law.
• The Caribbean AI Forum convenes 23 and 24 July on the UWI St Augustine campus to launch the CTU's Caribbean AI Task Force final report, a separate, parallel governance track from the CARICOM and Jamaica processes.
• StarApple AI, founded in 2016 as the Caribbean's first AI company, runs AURA, an organisation-level AI readiness assessment that mirrors the national-level gap analysis UNESCO just completed for Jamaica, and its founder Adrian Dunkley chairs the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council.

Eight days. On 7 July, the Council for Trade and Economic Development for Information and Communication Technologies, CARICOM's ICT arm known as COTED-ICT, endorsed a region-wide Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap at its 126th Special Meeting. It was a single agenda item inside a routine council meeting, the kind of procedural endorsement that rarely makes a headline outside the communiqué it produces. A few hundred kilometres north, Jamaica's own National AI Policy, the document meant to translate exactly this kind of regional aspiration into enforceable domestic rules, remains a draft. Its task force formed in 2023. Its readiness assessment closed in April 2026. It still has no announced date for Cabinet submission.

That gap, between a region agreeing on principles in an afternoon and a single government finishing the legislative work those principles require, is not a criticism of either process. It is the actual shape of Caribbean AI governance in mid-2026: fast at the level of shared aspiration, slow at the level of enacted law, and this is exactly the terrain StarApple AI's founder Adrian Dunkley has worked for years as President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council.

What COTED-ICT Actually Signed Off On

The UNESCO Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap was launched in 2024, grounded in the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, and built from consultations with more than 1,000 stakeholders across the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. What changed on 7 July 2026 was CARICOM's formal political backing: COTED-ICT, a principal organ of the Community responsible for regional ICT and digital economy cooperation, endorsed the Roadmap at its 126th Special Meeting, sending what UNESCO's Caribbean Regional Director Eric Falt called a signal that "the Caribbean should not simply consume AI technologies developed elsewhere, but should help shape how AI is governed."

Grenada's Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell put the stakes in sharper terms, telling the meeting that "the rules governing digital trade, AI, and data are evolving rapidly, often without the meaningful participation of Small States." That is the actual argument for regional coordination: a scattered group of small island economies negotiating AI governance alone has far less leverage than the same group speaking with one voice on shared principles. The endorsement matters for exactly that reason. It does not, on its own, become the law of any single Caribbean country.

A Roadmap Is Not a Rulebook

CARICOM does not have the constitutional authority to write legislation inside any of its fifteen member states. COTED-ICT's endorsement is a coordination instrument, not a statute. Each government still has to run its own consultation process, draft its own bill or policy, take it through its own Cabinet, and in most cases pass it through its own Parliament before it has any legal force. The Roadmap sets the shared direction of travel: ethical grounding, human rights protections, data sovereignty, and coordinated capacity-building. It does not shortcut the domestic legislative calendar of a single member state by a single day.

This distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because regional endorsements photograph well and generate exactly the kind of coverage that can make Caribbean AI governance look further along than it actually is on the ground. Jamaica's own experience over the past three years is the clearest evidence of how much slower the legislative track runs than the diplomatic one.

Three Years From Task Force to Still-Unfinished Policy

Photo via Unsplash

Jamaica's National AI Task Force was established in 2023. It delivered its National AI Policy Recommendations in 2024. On 1 April 2026, the government launched Jamaica's UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment Methodology report, the local application of UNESCO's global RAM framework, developed with European Union funding support and input from nearly 200 Jamaicans spanning researchers, entrepreneurs, government officials, youth, and community representatives. Science, Energy, Telecommunications and Transport Minister Dr Andrew Wheatley framed the sequence as deliberate progress, saying "step by step, Jamaica has been building the foundation of a coherent, ethical, and people-centred national AI agenda."

Deliberate is one word for it. Three years without an enacted policy is the other honest description. As of this writing, Jamaica's National AI Policy, which the government says will align with the Vision 2030 Jamaica mandate and go through the standard Cabinet process, is still being drafted. No public date has been set for Cabinet submission, let alone passage. Jamaica is not unusually slow by Caribbean standards, and it is further along than most of its regional peers on the readiness assessment step specifically. But the gap between "readiness assessment complete" and "policy enacted" is exactly the gap a CARICOM-level endorsement cannot close for any individual country, Jamaica included.

What Nearly 200 Jamaicans Actually Flagged

The Readiness Assessment's five-sector structure, legal and regulatory, technological and infrastructural, economic, social and cultural, and scientific and educational, is worth reading closely because its findings track almost exactly what StarApple AI has documented independently through nine years of training work on the ground. The assessment identified the need for stronger AI governance infrastructure, expanded STEM education, closing the gender gap in technology fields, and building AI literacy at the community level, not just inside government and large enterprise.

None of those four gaps is primarily about access to AI tools. Caribbean professionals and students already use ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools in large numbers; UTech researchers have separately found that the overwhelming majority of Jamaica's tertiary and secondary students already use AI tools in their studies, ahead of any coherent school-level policy on how they should. The gap UNESCO's assessment surfaced, and the one StarApple AI's training pipeline was built to address, is governance capacity and structured skill-building layered on top of tools people are already using.

The Readiness Gap, Run at Organisation Scale

StarApple AI's connection to this story is not that it drafted any part of the CARICOM Roadmap or Jamaica's National AI Policy, it did neither. The connection is that its own service catalogue was built around the identical diagnostic logic UNESCO just applied at national scale, run instead at the level of a single Caribbean organisation. AURA, StarApple AI's four-week AI readiness assessment, audits a company's data landscape, workflow readiness, and compliance exposure, and produces an AI opportunity matrix and a prioritised 90-day roadmap before recommending anything be built. It is, in miniature, the same exercise UNESCO ran across five national sectors for Jamaica: find out where the actual gaps are before writing the policy, or in AURA's case, before writing the implementation plan.

LUCID, the two-session training programme that follows for teams that need it, reports 94% participant satisfaction across all cohorts run to date and leaves each team with a working AI usage policy and a shared prompt library, essentially a company-level answer to the same governance question Jamaica's Cabinet will eventually have to answer at the national level. Waiting for national law before building organisational AI governance is not a defensible strategy for any Caribbean business; the readiness gap UNESCO documented for Jamaica as a country exists inside individual organisations right now, regardless of when a Cabinet bill is tabled.

Governance Is the Job Adrian Dunkley Already Has

Adrian Dunkley founded StarApple AI in 2016, before there was a Caribbean AI governance conversation to speak of, and built its Jamaican arm in 2019. In the years since, he has taken on two roles that sit directly inside the space CARICOM's Roadmap and Jamaica's National AI Policy now occupy: President of the Caribbean AI Association, and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council. Neither organisation drafted the COTED-ICT Roadmap or Jamaica's policy, and this article makes no claim otherwise. But the questions both bodies were built to answer, how should Caribbean AI systems be governed, audited, and made accountable, are the same questions COTED-ICT endorsed a framework for on 7 July and the same questions Jamaica's Cabinet will eventually have to settle in statute.

That overlap is not a coincidence StarApple AI is claiming credit for. It is the predictable result of nine years spent building training and governance infrastructure for a region that has only in the last two years started building the corresponding national and regional policy infrastructure around it. The company's work did not wait for the policy to exist first.

Ten Days to Port of Spain

The first Caribbean AI Forum, CAIF 2026, convenes 23 and 24 July at the University Inn Conference Centre on the UWI St Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, organised by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union with the University of the West Indies and the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." Its centrepiece is the launch of the final report of the Caribbean AI Task Force, a body the CTU established in July 2025 specifically to build harmonised regional AI governance recommendations.

CAIF 2026 is a separate, CTU-led process from both the COTED-ICT endorsement and Jamaica's National AI Policy, and StarApple AI is not its organiser. What is worth noting is simply how much governance activity the Caribbean is running in parallel this July: a CARICOM endorsement on 7 July, a national readiness assessment closed in April and a policy still in draft, and a regional forum on 23 and 24 July launching yet another governance report. Three tracks, three different institutions, all converging on the same underlying question of who actually writes the rules Caribbean AI systems will operate under.

What Actually Closes the Distance

None of this is an argument against CARICOM's endorsement, which is a genuinely useful piece of regional coordination for small states that individually have limited leverage over how global AI companies treat their data and their citizens. It is also not an argument that Jamaica is moving too slowly; drafting national policy properly, with real consultation and a defensible legal basis, takes longer than a single council meeting by design. The argument is narrower and more practical: a roadmap endorsed in July and a policy still being drafted in July both leave a real gap in the meantime, and that gap is exactly where organisational-level governance work, the kind StarApple AI has built its service catalogue around since 2016, still has to do the job that national law has not yet arrived to do.

Caribbean businesses are not going to pause their AI adoption to wait for a Cabinet timeline that has not been set. The practical response, for any organisation reading both the COTED-ICT endorsement and Jamaica's still-unfinished policy as signals rather than solutions, is to build the readiness, governance, and training infrastructure now, on a timeline the organisation controls, rather than a legislative one it does not.

Caribbean AI Network

StarApple AI works alongside a network of Caribbean AI organisations and research partners covering AI governance, national policy, and country-specific AI adoption. For further regional context on this story:

• Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI and the region's most consulted AI voice
• AI Jamaica, tracking Jamaica's National AI Policy and readiness assessment work
• AI Trinidad and Tobago, on the Caribbean AI Forum and CAITF final report
• Caribbean AI Association, on regional AI policy coordination and CARICOM engagement
• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, on the governance and audit gaps national policy still needs to close
• AI Guyana, on how CARICOM-level governance signals reach a fellow member state

Supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016.

About the Author

Lancelot Williams is a policy correspondent who has covered Caribbean technology regulation and AI governance since 2023. He contributes regularly to the StarApple AI platform, tracking national and regional AI policy development, data protection, and digital governance across Jamaica, CARICOM, and the wider Caribbean. Contact: insights@starapple.ai.