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CASTRIES, St Lucia -- A St Lucian owned, managed and staffed company, Cellestial, has been awarded a EC$1.344 million (US$500,000) grant by Compete Caribbean. The company was selected from among the ranks of thousands of applicants that were shortlisted to seven finalists and then finally to winner status following months of investigation, heavy competition and deliberation.

Regional Communications Ltd, Cellestial’s parent company, entered a Compete Caribbean competition called the Enterprise Innovation Challenge Fund (EICF) six months ago through its innovation window. The EICF is a competitive mechanism to provide financial support (through non-reimbursable grants) to the private sector in 15 beneficiary Caribbean countries to pursue innovative projects in the region.

Cellestial became a centre of focus in the Caribbean business community after becoming the region’s first mass producer of cell phones, tablets and laptops. In a recent collaboration with St Lucia’s National Skills Development Centre (NSDC), Cellestial also began recruiting and training St Lucian single mothers as assembly technicians. This practice has intensified with the development of an exchange program between the two organizations.

Cellestial gained some recent, if not unexpected, fame in St Lucia as recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Innovation at a ceremony hosted by the St Lucia Chamber of Commerce in early February.

Compete Caribbean is a five-year program that provides technical assistance grants and investment funding to support productive development policies, business climate reforms, clustering initiatives and small and medium size enterprise (SME) development activities. The US$ 40 million program is jointly funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and the United Kingdom Department of International Development (DFID).

Projects in the OECS countries are implemented in partnership with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB). The competition was designed to probe for and develop the ingenuity of the Caribbean private sector by encouraging firms and entrepreneurs to compete for non-reimbursable grant funding up to US$500,000.

As a winner, the Cellestial project is viewed as both innovative and risky. Cellestial is also positioned by Compete Caribbean as having the potential to make a significant contribution to the economic development of St Lucia and the Caribbean by taking risks to develop new products, implement new business models, and enter new export markets.

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