In a progressive move, the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus is seeking to establish a Day/Evening Care centre.
With a student body of over 6,000 and a staff complement of 953, Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal of the campus, Professor The Most Honourable Eudine Barriteau said it was “way past the time” for this to happen.
“This facility will service the campus and neighbouring community for day care, and provide after school care for children of evening students. More critically students studying early childhood education will have a built in laboratory to study early childhood behaviour,” she outlined.
Saying the centre would be a commercial project, she noted while there was internal demand, the campus was currently undertaking a feasibility study to determine market demand.
Another proposed initiative of the campus Barriteau explained, was that of establishing a new Division of Climate Adaptation and Environmental Sustainability to unlock the potential of the green and blue economies.
Noting this would be conducted through the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES), she said the challenges experienced by Caricom countries and the need to exploit the untapped resources of the Blue Economy require an expansion of CERMES’ capacity.
“Now is the time to do so. The University intends to build on this excellent record of accomplishments to both strengthen and expand CERMES’ interdisciplinary mandate and unleash CERMES to fully address Climate Adaptation and Environmental Sustainability,” she said.
Barriteau outlined the new division would: strengthen the capacity for undertaking applied, interdisciplinary research to support: climate action; water resources; clean energy; marine affairs; food security; gender; and other cross-cutting areas and; offer technical, advanced training and institutional support to tackle the wide range of deficits that currently constrain social and economic sustainable development in national and regional areas of priority.
She further highlighted it would revamp, expand and add new programmes by establishing four research and training clusters: Land Management, Environmental Resilience, Sustainable Energy Management and Air Quality Management; as well as train the next generation of Caribbean scientists, researchers, technocrats and technicians and; develop research and training programmes on Innovative Energy Technologies along with several other things. (JMB)