Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim says T&T will ben­e­fit from a rev­o­lu­tion­ary thrust in ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion over the next three years with the con­struc­tion of a mul­ti-cam­pus fa­cil­i­ty at To­ba­go, a new nurs­es acad­e­my and the new UWI law fac­ul­ty at Debe. Karim was speak­ing as the Gov­ern­ment com­menced the start of con­struc­tion of the new UWI cam­pus on Mon­day. A three-di­men­sion­al video pre­sen­ta­tion was shown to the au­di­ence be­fore Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of­fi­cial­ly cut the rib­bon to start work.

Al­though a con­trac­tor had not yet been hired and to­tal costs had not been fi­nalised, Karim said the project would be done in phas­es and there would be a new in­take of stu­dents by 2014. Not­ing that there would be no dis­crim­i­na­tion in the de­liv­ery of ed­u­ca­tion, Karim an­nounced that new op­por­tu­ni­ties for so­cial work­ers and nurs­es would be made avail­able. He out­lined a se­ries of planned projects that would im­pact pos­i­tive­ly on sev­er­al sec­tors, one of which was the open­ing of the for­mer EL Do­ra­do Girls' Youth Camp. "This will be trans­formed in­to a ded­i­cat­ed nurs­ing acad­e­my which will ad­dress close to 3000 lo­cal va­can­cies for nurs­es."

The min­is­ter said the open­ing of new fa­cil­i­ties for the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts in San­gre Grande and the start of in­fra­struc­ture works in Ch­agua­nas would "ad­dress the needs of these com­mu­ni­ties which were ne­glect­ed by pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions." Karim al­so said that To­bag­o­ni­ans would ben­e­fit through the con­struc­tion the To­ba­go In­te­grat­ed Learn­ing Cam­pus. "Our broth­ers and sis­ters on the sis­ter isle will no longer have to be re­strict­ed or in­con­ve­nienced by fre­quent trav­el to Trinidad to at­tend class­es," he said. Karim al­so said the open­ing of the O'Meara Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­tre would bring ben­e­fit to cit­i­zens. Karim said there would al­so be col­lab­o­ra­tion with in­ter­na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions such as the Na­tion­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore, the In­di­an In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, and the Pun­dit Deen­day­al Pe­tro­le­um Uni­ver­si­ty in In­dia.