EcoVista Smart City will be developed in Jamaica as the Caribbean's first university smart city
The project is currently open to international university and investment partners, with an immediate capital raise of US$15 million required to complete land acquisition.
The University of the Future? A Beachfront Smart City, an AI-Ready Campus, and the Caribbean's Next Big Investment Opportunity
"International investors have consistently underestimated the education and digital opportunity in this region," says Dr Winston Adams, OD, JP, Founder and Group Executive Chairman of the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean (UCC).
Dr Adams has been building Caribbean higher education infrastructure since 1992, when he founded the Institute of Management Sciences in Kingston at a time when fewer than four per cent of Jamaicans of eligible age had access to any tertiary education. UCC is now the largest independent private accredited university in Jamaica and the Caribbean, built on the same logic that has driven every decision since: find the learner the system was not designed to serve and build around them. What UCC is now attempting is the same logic at a different scale.
"The market, the technology, and the regional need have now converged. That convergence is not accidental, and it will not wait," says Dr Adams.
In a region where tertiary enrolment is falling short of national targets, a digital skills deficit is widening, and AI is restructuring every sector its graduates will enter, UCC is set to build something the Caribbean has never had. On 1,200 metres of beachfront in Trelawny, 40 minutes from Montego Bay's international airport, UCC Spectrum Group is developing EcoVista: the Caribbean's first university smart city. Alongside it, UCC has launched a national online university platform and established Jamaica's first formal institutional AI task force.
To build EcoVista, land acquisition is underway, with an immediate capital raise of US$15 million open to international investors.
Shifting Sands: The Caribbean's Digital-First Economy
Jamaica set a national goal to raise tertiary enrolment to between 50 and 70 per cent of the eligible age cohort by 2030 under its Vision 2030 development plan. Enrolment is currently at 29 per cent and declining. Approximately 70 per cent of the working population holds no recognised credential. Three million Jamaicans live abroad, a diaspora roughly equal in size to the domestic population, many of them qualified by experience and excluded by the absence of formal paper.
At the same time, the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report found that 63 per cent of employers globally already cite skills gaps as their primary barrier to growth, and that 59 in every 100 workers will need reskilling by 2030. Those are global figures, but the Caribbean feels them acutely.
Jamaica's Business Process Outsourcing sector, one of the island's largest employers, is already being reshaped as AI automates routine processing and higher-skill analytical roles open up in their place. The country has a national AI task force, a UNESCO readiness assessment completed in 2025, and a US$3.7 million UN programme using AI tools to support more than 450,000 students. The institutional response from universities has barely begun.
The question the numbers create is a practical one: what does the Caribbean university need to look like to close an access gap, absorb a diaspora, and produce graduates equipped for a labour market that is restructuring in real time? UCC's answer is three simultaneous bets: a physical smart city, a national digital platform, and an AI literacy programme embedded across every discipline, all operating at once.
EcoVista: Sixty University Cities Exist. The Caribbean Has None.
Approximately 60 university cities and knowledge districts exist globally: the education cities of the UAE, the science parks of South Korea, the campus cities of Europe. Each is built on the same logic, cluster education, research, technology business, and housing on shared infrastructure, and each reinforces the commercial life of the others. The Caribbean has no equivalent.
EcoVista, on a 283-acre beachfront site in Trelawny, is designed to be the first. The development combines a technology-enabled university campus for more than 5,000 students with four innovation districts: a FinTech Digital Sandbox offering regulated access to Caribbean markets; a HealthTech Bio-Quarter covering telemedicine, AI diagnostics, and medical tourism; an Innovation Launchpad housing AI development, BPO operations, and early-stage technology companies; and a Resort and Wellness District comprising 710 hotel rooms and 150 ...
