GEM Caribbean is a three-year project, supported by Canada´s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), that will establish, train, and strengthen entrepreneurship research teams in five Caribbean countries:  Colombia, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, and Barbados.

The research by these teams will measure the levels, underlying factors, and environmental constraints of entrepreneurship within each national environment and comparatively within the region by using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) methodology. The findings can assist policymakers, educators, and researchers (both applied and theory building) in creating supportive environments that encourage job creation and inclusive economic development through growth in entrepreneurship.

The overall objective of this project is to build research capacities on entrepreneurship research and to provide policymakers with a stronger empirical foundation on which to build and monitor progress in the promotion of entrepreneurship and job creation in the Caribbean.

The specific objectives include:

• To build the capacity of national research teams to conduct entrepreneurship research, report and disseminate their findings, and sustain their work in the long-term.  
• To generate research findings on entrepreneurship on a national and regional level, with a focus on high-growth entrepreneurship, particularly among youth and women as well as on creative industries in the Caribbean
• To facilitate discussion of these research findings and policy recommendations among the private sector, policy makers, educators, and researchers, particularly regarding promotion of high-growth entrepreneurship and gender and entrepreneurship.
• To generate a harmonized, publicly available database on entrepreneurship in the Caribbean through the application of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) methodology.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a not-for-profit academic research consortium that has as its goal making high quality information on global entrepreneurial activity readily available to as wide an audience as possible.  GEM is the largest single study of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Initiated in 1999 with 10 countries, GEM 2010 is conducting research in 59 countries.