Vice-Chancellor’s OVERVIEW
Already very good short-term results are being reported with multimillion dollar contracts and agreements signed and being executed. Agreements to take the university to the regional capital market are in place and 2022 will witness the roll out of these measures. Short- and medium- term strategies, therefore, are in place to see the university meet its revised self-financing targets. These strategies were promised. Outcomes will be delivered. The Revenue Revolution, then, is well on its way in a new and unprecedented fashion. It’s a moment that was imagined and is being managed. It was planned and is being implemented. The activist university will honour its pledges and maintain its strategic integrity. We are not afraid of the volatile world; we have visions for it and energy to meet it face on as an example of Caribbean resilience and thriving. We are amongst “the best in the developing West” and have shown the significance of such a hard-earned status. The year in review, then, was a period of academic prosperity in the face of the regional financial and health ferocity faced by the stakeholder family. We stood our ground and defended our communities and nations, serving them as we are mandated to do. The UWI is in a good, strategic position; to erase tomorrow what is today’s deficit. We are grateful for the extraordinary support received during the year. It will be the seed of tomorrow’s fruit.
university grew significantly within the mutually agreed deficit financing business model. The time has come to drive forward with the balanced budget approach in which frugality rather that the brutality of austerity holds the centre. Frugality is undoubtedly the mother of future growth. Austerity is the anchor of endless decline. The Chairman of the University Grants Committee, the Honourable Colm Imbert, agreed that outgoing chair, Honourable Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, would chair a sub-committee to bring these discourses to maturity. Working with the Honourable Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda, and regional finance ministers, the committee brought matters to maturity and closure. It affirmed that the governments and the university should enter into a new phase of mutual bonding and trust in order to move forward on the same page to prosperity. This is the new arena in which the future is being forged. Management is now empowered with better understanding to build out the new entrepreneurial UWI in order to close the US$25 million deficit within the multi-campus, consolidated eco-system. Government arrears that stood in 2015 at a record high of US$117 million is now reduced to US$45 million. Already the new commitment is yielding significant results. Coming out of our 2019 Management Strategy Retreat we rolled out the New Financial Plan 2020 to 2025. In addition to implementing a 10% cut in expenditure, it proposed a 10% increase in entrepreneurial revenue. A multimillion dollar revenue strategy is being implemented that focuses on new markets for our academic services.
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor, The University of the West Indies
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