(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) CARICOM Ministers of Education and Labour have agreed that the University of the West Indies (UWI) should conduct an in-depth study to research the impact of the continued migration of teachers, doctors and nurses, both intra and extra-regionally.
The agreement was reached during talks among the Ministers and Officials who met 19-21 October in Georgetown, Guyana, for the Fifteenth Meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD), which had a special focus on education and labour.
At a press conference on Saturday 21 October, Chair of the COHSOD Meeting, Hon. Anthony Wood, the Education Minister of Barbados said the Meeting discussed the impact of migration on the social and economic development of CARICOM countries. In this context, he noted that Ministers agreed on the need to find modalities to retain labour.
Among the mechanisms considered were, increasing the number of persons trained to meet local replacement needs; and the improvement of working and worker conditions through improved human resource management.
Minister Wood noted that the meeting also discussed the setting up of a programme of continuous assessment of the quality of teachers’ training, with a view to ensuring that students receive quality education in the classrooms across the Region.
The COHSOD Chair said the meeting, in a special caucus received a report on the status of education in Haiti from the Haitian delegation which was led by the country’s Minister of Education, H.E. Gabriel Bien-Aime. During the presentation, the Meeting noted Haiti’s priorities for training in English as a means of enhancing its participation in CARICOM.
A high point of the COHSOD Meeting was a lecture delivered by Chair of the Caribbean Commission on Health and Development (CCHD), Sir George Alleyne, who focused on health priorities in the Region. In his presentation, the CCHD Chair impressed upon Ministers the need for equal attention to be given to tackling Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) as HIV/AIDS had been receiving, since the evidence point to societies being burdened as a result of NCDs.
The COHSOD, in endorsing Sir George’s call, agreed that in an effort to promote healthy lifestyles, CARICOM Member States should reduce the importation of goods with fats, increase the tax on tobacco, ban smoking in public places and make physical education in schools a compulsory subject.
The other Ministers present at the press conference were, the Hon. Sam Condor, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education, St Kitts and Nevis; Hon. Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education and Labour, Belize; Hon Shaik Baksh, Minister of Education, Guyana; and Hon. Manzoor Nadir, Minister of Labour, Guyana.
