WORKING DRAFT

Caribbean Civic Lab

An implementation-first civic AI initiative: we build and deploy public-interest tools for small island states, and train local teams to run them.

What We Do

Caribbean Civic Lab builds and deploys civic AI infrastructure for small island states. We ship practical tools that people can actually use, then train local teams to run and improve them.

This work is designed to align with priorities often supported by organizations like UNDP and IDB: digital transformation of public institutions, open government and access to information, local skills development, and scalable, lower-cost models for SIDS.

What We Build (An Example)

Yuh Hear Dem? is one example of the kind of civic AI infrastructure CCL builds and deploys. It demonstrates our approach: modular tools, open source, local training, and replication to other islands.

LIVE
Barbados

Yuh Hear Dem?

An AI-powered transparency tool that makes Barbados Parliament debates searchable. Ask questions, get answers with timecoded source links back to the exact video moment.

  • 2000+ hours indexed
  • Open knowledge graph
  • Nonpartisan indexing only

90-Day Intent (Barbados-First)

This is the near-term plan we want feedback on. It is deliberately small and deliverable, and structured as a practical pilot that can be evaluated by public-sector and development partners.

Deployment hardening
Reliability, UX improvements, an operations runbook, and clearer source citations.
Replication kit
Parameterized ingest + transcript pipeline + docs so another island is a configuration exercise, not a rewrite.
Talent pipeline
A small local developer cohort contributing to a real public system (fellowship / hack-nights).

Note: regional replication is part of the long-term story, but the focus here is a Barbados-first flagship that can be exported.

What We Need

We are looking for a small number of aligned partners, including development organizations, to make this real without building a heavy institution too early.

Fiscal sponsor
An organization that can host the initiative and receive/hold restricted funds for pilot delivery.
Seed underwriting
Catalytic funding for servers/compute, dev stipends, and Barbados-first delivery (pilot scale).
Partners + feedback
Journalists, civil society, academia, and technologists who can pressure-test usefulness and neutrality.

This is a public draft to show intent and attract feedback. Caribbean Civic Lab is independent and not an official government project.