Shal­iza Has­sanali

The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) St Au­gus­tine cam­pus has been told to find ways to raise funds to as­sist with its op­er­at­ing cost which has crossed the bil­lion-dol­lar mark.

The uni­ver­si­ty was re­quired to sub­mit a com­pre­hen­sive strat­e­gy/plan by April 30 to raise mon­ey, based on rec­om­men­da­tions by the Fi­nance and Gen­er­al Pur­pos­es Com­mit­tee (FG­PC) and the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing (Test). The re­quest was based on a Cab­i­net minute of March 13. Both the FG­PC and Test made the rec­om­men­da­tion, Min­is­ter Fazal Karim said.

The plan, ac­cord­ing to Karim, is to re­duce "the an­nu­al per­cent­age of gov­ern­ment's con­tri­bu­tion to the an­nu­al bud­get of the cam­pus from the pe­ri­od 2014 to 2017."At a fo­rum en­ti­tled Cof­fee with the Prin­ci­pal, held at the Learn­ing Re­source Cen­tre, St Au­gus­tine, on Fri­day, UWI's prin­ci­pal Prof Clement Sankat in an ad­dress to staff mem­bers, whom he praised for their team ef­fort and com­mit­ment, said the uni­ver­si­ty need­ed to find ways to in­crease its in­come.

In a slide pre­sen­ta­tion to scores of work­ers, Sankat showed 12 ar­eas the uni­ver­si­ty could tap in­to to gen­er­ate funds.Sankat asked staff, "How many of you know that this cam­pus' bud­get is...more than $1 bil­lion? "That is what it takes to run this place. It crossed the bil­lion-dol­lar mark, and they now telling the prin­ci­pal, how you go­ing to find your own mon­ey?"That is the chal­lenge we have. How we go­ing to raise we own mon­ey?"Sankat said 73 per cent of UWI's bud­get was spent on wages and salaries for its 3,000 staff mem­bers.

"Which tells you how tight this bud­get is...how very tight, and how very close we have to man­age it."The re­main­ing 27 per cent, Sankat said, pays for "every­thing else."He said while the na­tion­al bud­get was $61 bil­lion, theirs was $1 bil­lion. They now have to find ways to re­duce that fig­ure, Sankat said.Sankat said much of what they re­ceived came from the Gov­ern­ment, for which they were grate­ful."Now, fees re­al­ly are our in­come. But the fees are paid by the Gov­ern­ment. So guess what? We have to wait."

Sankat said this cre­at­ed dif­fi­cul­ties for the uni­ver­si­ty.He said an­oth­er prob­lem was their re­ceiv­ables; they had more mon­ey out­side than in their cof­fers. Sankat not­ed the uni­ver­si­ty has not re­ceived mon­ey for new em­ploy­ees in the last four years.Sankat urged the em­ploy­ees to act with a sense of ur­gency and work to ex­ceed the uni­ver­si­ty's ex­pec­ta­tions.

MORE GOVT $$ IN 2014-2015

Karim said his min­istry and the FG­PC es­ti­mat­ed that gov­ern­ment's con­tri­bu­tion to UWI for 2014-2015 would be $550,695,558, in­clu­sive of con­tri­bu­tions to long-term loans of $11,165,000, which was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 7.7 per cent more than its con­tri­bu­tion in the 2013-2014 bud­get.Ac­cord­ing to the Cab­i­net minute of March 2014, Karim said, the to­tal cam­pus ex­pen­di­ture would be $669,695,558.

The rec­om­men­da­tions were made on the ba­sis of a re­port of the tech­ni­cal ad­vi­so­ry com­mit­tee to the Cam­pus Grants Com­mit­tee of UWI, on the bi­en­ni­um es­ti­mates for 2014-2015 and 2015-2016, in St Kitts and Nevis in Feb­ru­ary, Karim said.