CARIBAVIA 2025:

Next Steps for CARIBAVIA

By Kathryn B. Creedy.

CARIBAVIA is an ‘unconference’ conference. In attending my first event, a decade ago, I realized what was wrong with most conferences.

Yes, conferences, big or small, are a great opportunity to network as well as a licence to print money by coordinators which duly funds industry-wide efforts. They are also where business gets done and speakers are inspiring.

But then we return home. It falls quiet. CARIBAVIA is guilty too.

CARIBAVIA definitely has an agenda - a single Caribbean sky and the development of in-region educational and job opportunities across the region, not just a single island. It seeks to broaden economic development beyond tourism and illuminates the actions governments take that are counterproductive to this dream.

CARIBAVIA presents a vision of what the region could be if it coordinated its efforts on airline service, future planning and education. It also fires up the attending talent to take it further, to continue the work beyond the conference. It is very intimate, a forum for discussion, not just presentations. Ideas come tumbling out with enthusiasm and other ideas build on them in an electric exchange. The vision of what is possible begins to take shape. This is the secret sauce that makes it exciting.

It is also capped off with a Girls in Aviation Day coordinated by the newly formed Women in Aviation CaribSkies Chapter (which did come out of CARIBAVIA 2022). GIAD aptly illustrates what that electric energy and ideas is for - to make it better for the next generation.

While its intimacy is a benefit it is not the scale of a small conference that is important. That scale allows big ideas to ferment, but what is needed now is leveraging the energy, talent and minds to action. Action that could change the lives of residents who now rely largely on tourism. First step is to use this forum as a business and education alliance, one that will develop the programmes on which governments can act. Relying on governments to change the status quo is counterproductive.

It will take a coordinated effort of both past and present attendees and it must start first with business. What does business need to prosper and invest in the region? How can business and educators provide the solution without governments? One of this year's speakers has a great plan on which I reported on in this issue.

And it must come from the region itself, local talent - leaders - engaged on programmes that benefit the region. Those of us from outside the region should be lending our energy, ideas and networks to the cause. It can’t be run like some colonial power because we do not have the knowledge to do what is right. Only local leaders can do that.

So it is with some hope that future CARIBAVIA gatherings will not merely be an exchange of ideas but will identify and motivate local leaders to lead by capturing the energy of attendees. It is only then that something beyond rhetoric will get done. Otherwise CARIBAVIA, despite, its uniqueness, will be just another conference.