By Hon. Sebastian Bastian, MP, Minister of Innovation and National Development
On September 25, I sat in the General Assembly Hall as the Prime Minister addressed the world on behalf of The Bahamas. There is a particular weight to that room. Every nation in it has one voice, and a country of fewer than 400,000 people speaks from the same podium as the largest powers on earth. What we choose to say there tells the world what we intend to do at home.
The Prime Minister chose to speak about one of our most valuable resources. “My islands once exported salt, sponge and sisal,” he said. “Others set the price. Others kept the profit. The commodity has changed. The pattern has not.”
Today, that commodity is data, and artificial intelligence has only accelerated the pattern. The data of Bahamians leaves our shores as raw material and comes back as products we must buy. The question is not what AI will do. It is what a country must be able to do for its people in the age of AI. For generations, we have measured national capacity in roads, ports, airports, electricity and water. They have shaped what our economy can produce and how independently we can act, and we are still building them. But the next layer of national infrastructure is less visible and no less important. Compute. Data.
Citizen-centred digital services. Cybersecurity. And the people and skills to put all of it to work. We do not need to match the computing power of the United States or China, and it would make little sense to try. But there is an enormous difference between using somebody else’s technology and depending entirely on somebody else’s capacity. Sovereignty in the digital age is not about owning everything. It is about keeping our choices: deciding what we must own, what we must control, what we can access securely, and what we should obtain through partnership. And sovereignty can no longer be defined by borders. It must be able to travel. That realization is anchored in an uncomfortable truth.
For a small island developing state, disruption is not a distant possibility. It is a condition of life. Hurricanes are the threat we know best, but they are not the only one. Ransomware has already reached our national broadcaster and our national university, and a severed undersea cable, a failed power grid or a pandemic can close the doors of government just as surely as a storm can.
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama for two days and caused damage the Inter-American Development Bank put at $3.4 billion, more than a quarter of our economy. On Abaco, government offices, records and communications went down along with everything else. Families arrived in Nassau with only what they could carry, many without a single piece of government identification to prove who they were. In 2019, the state could not keep running from somewhere the storm could not reach. Today, it could, if we plan the right way and make the right investments. That is the idea behind a digital embassy. Embassies have long allowed a nation to keep a protected presence beyond its borders. In 2017, Estonia and Luxembourg agreed the first arrangement of this kind for the digital age, placing critical Estonian government data and systems in Luxembourg under Estonian jurisdiction.
A digital embassy is more than a backup of files. It provides a protected environment for the systems and applications on which public services depend, so that a Bahamian can still prove who they are, receive a payment or register a business while the islands recover. For an archipelago, that is what it means to modernize government: the public keeps seamless access to its services, whatever the disruption. I understand why some Bahamians will hear this and feel uneasy.
The Prime Minister has just told the world that our data leaves our shores on other people’s terms, and a plan to hold government systems abroad can sound like more of the same. That concern deserves an answer, not a dismissal. The difference is who holds the authority. Data leaving as raw material is the old pattern, where others set the terms and others keep the value. A digital embassy reverses that pattern. It is our jurisdiction travelling with our data: our records, under our law, on our terms, held somewhere a hurricane cannot reach. Sovereignty is not diminished by that. It is how sovereignty survives. It is also what keeps the door of opportunity open. A family that can establish its identity can start again sooner. A small business on Grand Bahama that can file, pay and trade the week after a storm recovers faster, and so does the economy around it. Every day government stays open after a disaster is a day Bahamians spend rebuilding, not waiting on systems that were never built to survive the storm. We will not do this alone.
The Disaster Risk Management Authority capably leads this country’s preparation for and recovery from disasters and the Ministry of Innovation and National Development will work with the Authority as this work progresses. At the United Nations, I joined the launch of a new partnership between the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies to apply artificial intelligence across the disaster risk reduction cycle. I said there that The Bahamas should be a first adopter of technologies and initiatives that increase redundancy and enhance resilience. We have since acted on those words. The Bahamas is among the first nations to submit an expression of interest to join the partnership.
At home, this Ministry will determine which functions of government must survive a Category 5 storm, and how they will be protected. We are exploring the digital embassy model as part of that work. I will report publicly on our progress. A Ministry that asks Bahamians to think differently owes them a running account of what it is doing. No one can predict where artificial intelligence goes next. But small states have always known one thing: the storm will come again, in one form or another. The cost of building capacity may be significant. The cost of having none will be greater.
Sebastian Bastian is Minister of Innovation and National Development and Member of Parliament for Fort Charlotte
