Caribbean Investment Initiative

Building Infrastructure for a Region that Private Capital has Overlooked

Across the Caribbean, capital has flowed almost entirely as debt and development assistance, while entrepreneurs and growth-stage businesses have had little access to equity. Since 2020, 17III has been building the research, capacity, and investment infrastructure the region needs to close that gap and attract genuine patient capital to enable long-term growth and wealth creation in the region.

Why This, Why Now

Across the Caribbean, high borrowing costs are routinely read as a sign of risk. The evidence tells a different story. The region's banking systems are small, concentrated, and thinly capitalized; government borrowing crowds out what little credit is available to the private sector; and the fixed costs of compliance and oversight fall on loan books too small to absorb them, overall, increasing the price of debt to even healthy, cash-generating businesses. Debt, in other words, is often being asked to do a job it structurally cannot do in this region.

This is where the Caribbean's "missing middle" lives: entrepreneurs and growth-stage businesses across the region — profitable, demand-driven, technically capable — that are too large for microfinance and too small and too dispersed for institutional private equity to take seriously. It is general, not limited to any one sector, and it is largely invisible to outside capital, which has long seen the Caribbean only as a tourism destination.

But diversifying the overall capital stack in the region and closing this missing middle gap takes more than capital arriving. Many of the region's businesses are family-run and informally governed, shaped by a reasonable, historically-rooted wariness of outside ownership. Investment readiness here is as much a behavioral and trust-building challenge as a financial one — building the governance literacy, transparency, and confidence that let a business genuinely engage with equity, on terms it understands and trusts. That is the work this initiative exists to do: independent of, and ahead of, any single capital provider.

What We Do

17III supports the Caribbean's shift toward an equity-oriented capital base through three connected functions.

Research & Market Intelligence

Sector and country-level research on capital flows, investment barriers, and growth opportunities across the region — building on the Initiative’s original 2020 research and extended through subsequent fieldwork in food systems, energy, and adjacent sectors. This includes behavioral research on investor decision-making in underdeveloped markets, work that informs how capital providers and Caribbean enterprises engage with each other.

Investment Capacity Building

Through the 17III Fellowship, the Initiative trains researchers and practitioners in regional deal sourcing, financial modeling, and diligence support — building a pipeline of talent equipped to work across Caribbean private markets. Fellows have contributed to pipeline and investor-readiness work in food systems to date, with the Fellowship now extending into energy and infrastructure projects.

Investment Readiness

Many Caribbean agri-businesses have already been through general business and financial literacy training offered by regional development organizations. Our work picks up from there: deal-specific due diligence — market sizing, financial modeling, valuation — that leaves a business genuinely investor-ready, whether or not it ultimately raises from any specific capital source.

Our Work To Date

We convened over 50 investors, civil society leaders, and policymakers — beginning with an in-person gathering in New York in early 2020 — to assess the Caribbean's investment landscape.
Investing in Sustainable Opportunities in the Pan-Caribbean
SOCAP Global Impact Summit, where we hosted a session on SDG Investment in the Caribbean
That research culminated in The Case for SDG Investment in the Caribbean, published in partnership with Elatus Capital Advisors and launched that November. The report identified food systems and energy among the region's most promising growth sectors, and diagnosed the core problem this initiative still addresses: Caribbean SMEs generate roughly 40% of regional GDP, yet receive only 12% of total credit — less than half the OECD average — with loan rejection rates as high as 85%.
Caribbean Sustainable Investment Forum
Building on that earlier research, we partnered with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on a multi-year regional needs assessment across eleven Caribbean markets — cataloguing 130+ investment opportunities, building a database of over 1,000 stakeholders, and training more than 700 government officials, financial institutions, and value chain actors. The partnership culminated in the design of two complementary capital vehicles for the region.
Caribbean Agri-Food Investors Conference
Driving Innovative Financing and Sustainable Investments Toward Food System Transformation and Achievement of the SDGs in the Caribbean
The Caribbean Food Systems Investment Initiative's research and pipeline work led directly to the design of CaribGROW, a $100 million private equity vehicle for Caribbean food systems, soft-launched in September 2025. 17III now provides technical assistance alongside the fund's investment activity — supporting portfolio companies with operational advisory, governance readiness, and access to the Fellowship's research capacity — work that is structurally distinct from, and sits outside, the fund's own investment decisions.
CaribGROW Fund
From Soil to Sea: Investing in Caribbean Food Systems