This scoping study was conducted within an overarching research project “Harnessing Open Data to Achieve Development Results in Latin America and the Caribbean”, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and executed by the Caribbean Open Institute (COI) in collaboration with partners Iniciativa Latinoamericana por los Datos Abiertos (ILDA), Fundacion Avina, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Organization of American States (OAS). The larger project explores how open data policies and strategies can contribute to the development agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) through the following general objectives:
1. To improve understanding of the demand for, and use of, Open Data for development in the Caribbean
2. To support the collaborative development of products and services between government, civil society, academic institutions and entrepreneurs
3. To promote the development and adoption of emerging open standards that enable open data initiatives to scale up
4. To explore mechanisms for open data to address the needs of marginalized groups, focusing particularly on, but not limited to, youth, women and urban poor.
This particular study is one of five regional sector-specific scoping studies undertaken in support of Objective 1. It examines the nature, use and potential impacts of open data in fisheries and marine protected areas (MPAs) in a sample of Caribbean countries: Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Bahamas, Jamaica and Dominican Republic.

The peculiarities of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), small land masses and low population numbers, impact upon the nature of open data an official statistics. Statistical processes are built around the precepts of protection of the identity of individual data provider, the provider being a natural person or a corporate entity. The protection of the privacy of the data provider is built into the various Statistics Acts and all the rules and guidelines used in developing the various statistical products.
The review of four (4) SIDS, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago being part of the Caribbean Region, to determine their readiness for the publication of Official Statistics in an open data platform reveals that there a number of challenges that would have to be overcome before official statistics can be published as open data.

This paper estimates the potential impact of Open Government Data on the Jamaican economy at a macro level and at sector-specific levels, by scaling the expected GDP contributions derived from a meta-analysis of the existing literature The results of this analysis show that Open Data implementation has the potential to contribute between JA$2.2 and JA$2.9 billion to Jamaica’s economy through the Education sector and JA 10 billion through the Agricultural Sector. Similar initiatives in the Tourism sector, are projected to improve productivity between 1-10%, realizing a potential economic impact of between JA$ 2.4 and JA$ 23.7 billion.

The Caribbean tourism sector can benefit from Open Data initiatives to bring value to the tourism industry stakeholders and Caribbean economies. In some Caribbean islands, tourism is the primary contributor to economic success. This success needs to be sustained as although Caribbean tourism destinations have a long history of providing tourism products and services, greater global competition and new emerging tourism destination can threaten the success from tourism activity. There is recognition that tourism data can be a catalyst for the promotion of a viable tourism sector. Hence, this Open Data report about the Caribbean tourism sector can contribute to identification of the issues and challenges with making greater access to tourism data.

The report has several sections that handle the WWF and the ORDN Open Data reference frameworks. These were utilized to examine the state of readiness of the Caribbean tourism sector for Open Data initiatives. The research study was conducted in five (5) Caribbean countries with different levels of tourism activity. This is important for scaling Open Data initiatives in the regions and the potential impacts can be assessed based on the various tourism contexts. Certain Caribbean tourism policy issues were identified based on a CTO report and these were explored in relation to the usefulness of tourism data.