My Story
Long before any of the development work, I learned something very early:
education changes the trajectory of a life.
And I don’t mean through credentials or examinations necessarily. I’m talking about the internal development that happens through education itself: learning how to think critically, solve problems, communicate clearly, adapt under pressure, and understand both yourself and the world around you.
I’ve seen too many Caribbean young people internalise the idea that serious thinking belongs somewhere else, that intellectual authority is imported, and that real capability exists abroad. So for many, the highest ambition becomes leaving.
I reject that completely.
The Caribbean is filled with intelligent, creative, resourceful young people capable of far more than many of our systems currently prepare them for. But potential alone is not enough to navigate a world like this.
The work behind this
In my late teens and early twenties, I worked in the energy sector. I was still dependent on taxis and maxis to get to work, surrounded by a completely different world through the expat professionals and executives around me. The gap between how people lived and what seemed possible for their futures felt enormous. I became obsessed with understanding why some people move beyond those constraints while others spend their lives fighting just to reach stability. That question pushed me beyond economics and into development work, youth programming, governance, and education.
A BSc and MSc from the University of the West Indies, then a Fulbright Scholarship took me to American University for a master’s in international development, where I graduated Summa Cum Laude. At the Trinidad and Tobago EITI Secretariat, I built the policy, stakeholder engagement, and public communications work from the ground up. During that period, Trinidad and Tobago scored 89 out of 100 in its EITI assessment, with its public communications approach recognised as best practice. At the IDB, I co-authored the bank’s five-year country strategy for Trinidad and Tobago and later advised the country’s US$42M digital transformation programme. I also directed UNICEF’s YOMA platform around youth employability and digital access.
Across all of that work, I kept running into the same reality: young people are being asked to navigate a rapidly changing world with systems that are often struggling to keep pace.
That is a large part of why this work exists.
