The Caribbean Open Trade Support (COTS) Program of USAID/Barbados is designed to facilitate the transition of selected Organization of Eastern Caribbean States member states to open trade, and to enable the countries to compete more successfully and be more sustainable in the global economy. To this end, COTS will implement a wide range of activities over a four year period geared towards:
- Enabling businesses to compete more effectively in the global economy
- Enhancing public-private sector interaction and dialogue leading to improved public policy dialogue
- Assisting government institutions and agencies to remove administrative barriers to the growth of the private sector
- Increasing the private sector and the media’s understanding of the challenges and opportunities of the new trading regimes
- Increasing the region’s resilience to natural disasters
- Mitigating the impacts of human disturbance on ecosystems and improving the institutional framework for managing protected areas
The COTS Program provides business advisory services under its Private Sector Development Component to client firms to increase sales. COTS assist clients to identify and remove constraints inhibiting sales growth through focused and cost effective support. Specific support from the Program is tailored to removing the constraint or “bottleneck” that inhibits a specific business transaction. Services range from business mentoring and networking assistance to providing local, regional or international consultants. These services that are provided will result in:
- Significant sales generation for assisted firms in Dominica is one of the primary objectives.
Dominica is presently faced with numerous challenges as they seek to develop the main sectors, namely Agriculture and Tourism, which constitutes the building blocks of our national economy. More competitive enterprises in a number of clusters such as tourism, ICT, food and beverage, agro-processing, light manufacturing, entertainment, financial services, and advertising and public relations (PR) Streamlined, more efficient, pro-biodiversity and more environmentally friendly firms need t be developed. Enhanced private sector knowledge of, and access to, global markets, resulting in increased and sustainable exports. Agriculture seems to be the worst affected and is becoming increasingly difficult to compete at the local, regional and international levels. A primary contributing factor to this problem is the lack of new business involvement in this sector. In this competitive world environment, there arises an urgent need to inject new ideas and technology into the sector if it is to attain sustainability.
This assignment seeks to assist the Client to meet increased demand for its products with the design and installation of an effective water distribution system and implementation of efficient production systems. Also recommendations (See item 7) were discussed and listed below for further expansion, increased volume and effective sales and marketing.