The University of the West Indies, Mona –Western Jamaica campus (UWI Mona-WJC) was established in the city of Montego Bay in August 2008 as a direct response to the critical demand for higher educational opportunities and access across Western Jamaica. In accordance with its mandate, the UWI Mona-WJC has successfully engaged with its publics in diverse ways.

These have included community interventions through partnerships involving outreach and research with a view to understandingand ameliorating critical social and developmental challenges faced by the various sectors within the city of Montego Bay and across the wider Western region generally. Central to the UWI Mona-WJC mission and success, has been the development of students targeted to become change makers of significance in and at all levels of their various types of communities.

Methodology:

As an emerging campus with a uniquely small but diverse mix of academics offering programmes across all the traditional faculties, the approach has been multipronged & multidisciplinary drawing on a mix of methods across ethnography, phenomenology, interviews, surveys and correlational research.The partnerships have resulted in distinguished publications, public lectures and symposia, and several social, cultural and policy interventions and initiatives.

Research Impact

Direct application of The UWI tradition of excellence in academics; creativity in student-leadership and innovation in research; as well as the active participation and influence in community, civic, and corporate outreach across Western Jamaica, are assisting UWI’s western constituents and stakeholders, and by extension, Jamaica to advance towards meeting medium term sustainable development goals , specifically in education, gender, economic growth, industry, and sustainable cities and communities.

Notable results include:

• Over 900 graduates in media and communication, law, management studies, medicine, nursing, tourism, and business administration.
• Public recognition of the strategic partnerships which have led to the campus becoming a significant part of the city’s sustainable development agendaStudent scholarships, bursaries, internships and placements from across the tourism, travel, financial and knowledge management industries

Over 100 inner-city youths trained in community film-making (UWI Community Film Project and GATTFEST)