The Secretary-General of CARICOM, Mr Edwin Carrington proposed, during the annual business meeting of the Council of the University of the West Indies held on Friday, April 8, 2005 at Mona, that the two regional institutions cooperate more closely in seeking to enhance the development of the English-speaking Caribbean region.

The University Council, while considering a report by a Task Force on the Liberalisation of Higher Education and its impact on the region, heard a proposal from Edwin Carrington that the Chancellor, Sir George Alleyne, the Vice Chancellor, Professor E. Nigel Harris and Chair of the Task Force, Pro Vice Chancellor Hilary Beckles, participate in the special meeting of the CARICOM Heads of Government, scheduled for April 15, 2005 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The invitation was readily accepted.

Professor Beckles in presenting the Task Force report to Council noted that the Caribbean region was regarded as the most open marketplace in the world and acknowledged that the proliferation of off-shore ‘for-profit’ providers of higher education throughout the region in recent years was largely a result of this traditional openness. He pointed to the need to strike a balance between the legitimate interests of the countries contributing to the UWI to rapidly expand access of their populations to higher education and to attract the investments embodied by these ‘for-profit’ institutions, with their commitment to the University of the West Indies as the regional provider of higher education.

The Council was sufficiently concerned at the possible negative implications for the UWI of the haphazard growth of these off-shore institutions in the region and the uncoordinated commitments being made by contributing countries under the current round of negotiations in the WTO/General Agreement on Trade in Services, to have established the Task Force at its meeting last year.

The issues which require the immediate and serious consideration of CARICOM Governments are the need for better coordination of initiatives and commitments in the area of higher education and the pressing matter of establishing common standards and benchmarks for accrediting the academic programmes of local, regional and international tertiary level institutions.

These are the issues which the CARICOM Secretary-General wants the leadership of the UWI to bring to the attention of Heads of Government.
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Cecile Clayton
Office of Administration
UWI, Mona Campus

April 11, 2005