Regional and hemispheric investment promotion agencies including the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) met in Bogota, Colombia recently, to collectively probe best practices for country branding strategies likely to attract foreign direct investment.
The three-day forum was staged against the backdrop of mounting pressures on Caribbean territories to find more effective ways of marketing the respective countries abroad with a view to raising their investment profiles.
The choice of Colombia as the locale for the forum derived from the successes realized by two local entities, PROColombia and Invest in Bogota in the areas of in-country and city branding, respectively.
In seeking to rationalize last week’s Bogota forum President of the Caribbean Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (CAIPA) McHale Andrew of Invest Saint Lucia told the forum that one of the challenges facing the region had to do with “how to change the perception of the Caribbean as being that of a destination solely for vacation tourism.” Accordingly, the key objective of the visit to Colombia was “to seek insight into the best practices for country branding strategies to attract foreign direct investment (FDI),” a release from Caribbean Export, one of the organizers of the forum, said.
The release said that while the Caribbean is well known a top holiday destination that promises sun, sea and sand all year round, “increasingly, the need for the Caribbean to be known for more than this is being called for to attract the levels of FDI required to provide economic diversity and growth for our long-term sustainability.”
Here in Guyana, advocates of foreign investment and business houses promoting tourism partially blame the limited attention which the country has attracted from both potential investors and tourists to a lack of investment by government in marketing Guyana abroad.
One of the recommendations arising out of the Colombia visit was the need to develop integrated campaigns that focus on the unique aspects of the Caribbean and which target Caribbean nationals locally to support the instillation of national pride across the region, and cultivate a brand that all Caribbean citizens can utilise in the promotion of their products or services in addition to fostering ongoing regional integration.
The forum was implemented with support from the Inter-American Development Bank as a part of a Regional Public Goods Programme with the Caribbean entitled: Support to FDI in the Caribbean. The study tour was also made possible with the support of the European Union under the 10th European Development Fund Regional Private Sector Development Programme which includes the Bi-National Haiti/Dominican Republic Programme. It supports Caribbean Export’s objective of strengthening Caribbean IPAs in order to increase foreign direct investment in the region and follows on several such initiatives undertaken recently including a CAIPA study tour to PRONicaragua and JAMPRO in 2014.
Participating IPAs also included Antigua & Barbuda Investment Authority, Invest Barbados, the Bahamas Investment Authority, the Belize Trade & Investment Development Service, Curacao Investment and Export Promotion Agency, the Centre for Exports and Investment in the Dominican Republic, the Grenada Industrial Development Corporation, the Centre for Facilitation of Investments in Haiti, Invest Saint Lucia, Jamaica Promotion Corporation, Invest SVG (St Vincent & the Grenadines), the Investment and Development Corporation of Suriname and invesTT (Trinidad & Tobago).
