LACNIC announced today an agreement with Google to work on strengthening digital markets in countries of Central America and the Caribbean by developing different training initiatives.

In each of the three countries where the experience will be implemented, LACNIC and Google will offer a one-and-a-half-day course on interconnection and a half-day workshop on entrepreneurship and digital marketing.

The experience is set to kick off during the second half of 2018 in three different countries: Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The project seeks to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem and local connectivity, more specifically, the flow of traffic. “In order to promote the development of a digital market, we must work both on strengthening the Internet and critical infrastructure, as well as on developing the digital services that will be offered,” noted Laura Kaplan, Head of Development and Cooperation at LACNIC.

“For Google, this program complements our efforts and investments in Central America and the Caribbean aimed at bringing our services closer to their users, including, among other initiatives, deploying Points of Presence (POPs) in Guatemala and other possible locations in the region.

Together with LACNIC, we will work on these courses that seek to contribute knowledge and build local capabilities in this area which continues to grow and offer employment opportunities in the region,” said Gabriel Recalde, Public Policy Manager for Central America and the Caribbean at Google.

The courses will be developed by LACNIC and Google professionals, partnering with local Internet ecosystem allies in each country.

Technical training will be offered in the form of a one-and-a-half-day course on interconnection for experts and professionals working with local ISPs and IXPs/NAPs. The course will take into account each country’s current situation, identifying their main challenges in terms of Internet access and utilization, mapping the actors that are part of the ecosystem, how they interact with each other, and the main barriers to traffic exchange.

Special emphasis will be placed on the benefits of local traffic and the development of tools that will help local decision-makers, including business model analyses and trust-building. Topics covered by the course will include IPv6, BGP, RPKI, routing best practices, open standards, and root servers.

In addition, in each of the countries where the technical courses will be taught, a half-day workshop on entrepreneurship and digital marketing will also be offered. The goal of this workshop is to reach entrepreneurs in the field of technology and small- and medium-size ventures offering digital services at local level. The dates of the courses and details on how to register will be announced during the second half of 2018 through LACNIC’s regular communications channels.