The newspapers reported that Planning Minister Tewarie expressed the need locally for more software developers saying, "Imagine we have all of these engineers coming out of the university and we have all of these companies that are involved in ICT and yet we do not have any apps capability in the country. If we want to be in the new world we also have to understand how to create the capacity in order to do that."
The engineers that the Faculty of Engineering UWI is producing, especially electrical engineers, are not software developers or programmers. Surely they can develop software just as an electrical engineer can wire a house. Software, the digital language, is the medium through which our engineers get their components to interact; ranging from chips on a circuit board to engineering process sub-systems.
They are trained, for example, like Dr Ronald Defour, to build sophisticated systems that can make a fundamental impact on energy efficiency as opposed to trying to be another Zuckerberg and build a killer app or use simple mathematics and software tools to build basic human resource or health databases apps.
This is the expertise of our engineers, one that is required to transform our economy, to address the global problems of climate change, energy efficiency, renewable energy, food and water shortage etc. But with the acute market failure in T&T in this area and no government policy or action to address this problem these engineers emigrate; some 70 per cent of our graduate workforce emigrate.
The faculty has just applauded one of its graduate students who has topped his MSc class in a UK university and on this performance has been awarded a scholarship to do his PhD by one of the leading manufacturers of aero engines to work on its avant garde engine systems. The patents we have done at UWI languish while the government, with its failed institutions, complains about the pittance required to upkeep the patents.
The recent report by the IDB, "Rethinking Productive Development," states that the Caribbean and Latin American regions have failed to diversify their economies because of the inability of their governments to address the associated market failures.
The reason why our skilled human resource is emigrating is because our governments have not been able to design and implement policies and actions to target this market failure. There is no management, no leadership, no vision, no accountability, no ethics and a lot of dishonesty. It will probably require a major economic crisis to drive change."
Economic diversification is impossible in this country without adequate governance, the institutions, that address the current market failures. Inviting companies like Medulan to set up shop in our free zones to develop software for the US market, seeking to use local cheap skilled labour and benefit from government tax breaks and subsidies, is no way to address market failure or build an economy.
Still, we celebrate the work we do at the Faculty of Engineering even if it is the success of some of our graduates in other enlightened economies.
St Clair A King
Professor Emeritus,
Faculty of Engineering, UWI