The Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ), through its Boosting Innovation Growth and Entrepreneurship Ecosystems (BIGEE) programme, has opened a four-week Call for Concept Notes for the Jamaica Business Fund (JBF), a grant fund product aimed at supporting groups of businesses, operating as clusters. 

The call, according to the DBJ, is step one of a two-step application process, with funding up to US$300,000 available for successful projects. 

David Wan, acting managing director, DBJ states; “In our continued efforts at facilitating economic growth and development of all Jamaicans, we want to support clusters and supply chains to improve their productivity levels to take advantage of local, regional and global opportunities.  It is our view that the strengthening of partnerships and business linkages can lead to increased employment, and further growth and development of the nation’s economy.” 

The JBF will support two types of groups, namely horizontal business alliances and vertical business alliances. For this grant product, a horizontal business alliances represents a group of at least four companies that come together to improve their productivity and competitiveness through economies of scale. This model generally involves projects that are aimed at amalgamating or aggregating products or services to meet specialise markets, centralize, or group purchases, innovations and knowledge transfer, and other collective initiatives.

On the other hand, vertical business alliances consist of the creation of an alliance between an anchor or main buyer and its suppliers to improve efficiency and productivity within supply chains. In general, this involves projects that address challenges related to enhancing providers’ business performance and technology transfer in productive spheres.

Christopher Brown, Programme Manager, BIGEE at the DBJ indicated that the cluster model had predominantly attracted agricultural projects, the intention of this cycle is to identify clusters of businesses operating in other sectors such as, but are not limited to, information technology, creative industries, tourism, health, education, and non-crop agriculture enterprises.”  

Given the current challenges facing the Caribbean and the world, climate resilient solutions utilisation adaptation or mitigation innovations or technologies are high priority for the Jamaica Business Fund.

Application must be completed online and the application window will remain open until March 25.

Since the inception of the Jamaica Business Fund, the Government of Jamaica has invested J$957,000,000 across four cycles. The DBJ has replicated the model under its BIGEE programme and will invest a further JMD450,000,000 across cycles 5 and 6.

The DBJ is the executing agency for a Government of Jamaica, IDB and European Union funded programme known as Boosting Innovation, Growth and Entrepreneurship Ecosystems (BIGEE) which is focused on growing the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems in Jamaica.