Effective August 2012, the Faculty of Pure & Applied Sciences at the Mona and Cave Hill Campuses of The University of the West Indies, in Jamaica and Barbados respectively,  will be renamed the Faculty of Science and Technology. The decision was taken at the annual business meeting of the Council of The University of the West Indies, held recently at the Mona Campus. The new Faculty will have a heavy focus on technology, particularly information communication technologies (ICT). 
 
The decision to rename the Faculties on the Cave Hill and Mona campuses signals the rebranding and repositioning of Science with Technology throughout the institution and also makes them consistent with the Faculty at the St Augustine Campus in Trinidad & Tobago. 
 
Another major strategic move made at Council was the decision to merge the Department of Management Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Mona with the Mona School of Business. The merged entity, to be known as the Mona School of Business and Management, will operate within the Faculty of Social Sciences. This will facilitate the goal of institutional accreditation of all business programmes at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. The merger was commended as a model for the business schools at the Cave Hill and St Augustine Campuses to emulate.
 
Council also decided to reinstate a dedicated Agriculture Faculty at the St Augustine Campus, reversing a 14-year decision which had seen the subject  area reduced to the School of Agriculture within the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at the St Augustine Campus. This endorsed some strategic decisions taken in February by the University Strategy and Planning Committee. This Faculty has now been divided into two separate entities: the Faculty of Food and Agriculture and the Faculty of Science and Technology. Stakeholders in the Agriculture sector had long been calling for this reinstatement and it is hoped that the new Faculty with its focus on food with agriculture, will address the pressing problem of food security in the region. 
 
The annual business meeting of the Council of the UWI on this occasion also approved the Strategic Plan that will guide the institution for the 2012 – 2017 period. This is the fifth such cycle since the UWI began strategic planning in 1992. The new plan reinforces the University’s core functions of teaching and learning, research and innovation but in addition places special emphasis on the need for greater employee engagement, the strengthening of its regional remit and diversification of its financial base. With the introduction of the Balanced Scorecard framework, this latest Strategic Plan includes the metrics needed to assess implementation of the goals and strategies more effectively than was possible in the previous Strategic Plan.