The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant additional strain that it has placed on the resources of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has not diminished the enthusiasm of the regional institution for throwing its support behind creative pursuits in the Caribbean.
On Friday December 11, the Bank announced that it had awarded US$100,000 in grants to seven cultural projects through an initiative that is aimed at providing emergency relief to the creative industries (CI) sector in the wake of COVID-19.
The CDB says that the grant is intended to assist Caribbean entrepreneurs who have suffered loss of income on account of COVID-19–related missed opportunities resulting in loss of income in various Music Festival and Carnival events that faced cancellation as a result of the pandemic. The funds were disbursed by the Bank under a special Emergency Relief Grant, an output of its Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Fund (CCIIF).
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, hard-hit small and medium-sized enterprises in the creative industries sector in seventeen of the nineteen borrowing member countries of the CDB submitted more than 300 applications for assistance to the CDB, according to Lisa Harding, Coordinator of Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Development at the CDB.
Creative entities which benefitted from CDB’s grants were the Kingston Creative from Jamaica which recently re-fashioned its monthly Artwalk Festival into a virtual event after closure due to the pandemic; TicketLinkz of Barbados; a creative audience-building service, the Barbados Innovative Media TV service; the broadcast production company, MarNiko Media, also out of Barbados; Headline Entertainment and CaribTix Jamaica Limited; Barbados-based Operation Triple Threat; and Belize Music Agency.
All of these grants are intended to support the COVID relief efforts of the respective entities.
