Caricom and Haiti Youth Ambassador Leticia Cadet asked a special meeting of COHSOD to make rebuilding Haiti’s education system a priority “to avoid creating a potentially detrimental gap in qualified human resources.”
According to a press release from the Caricom Secretariat, Cadet made an impassioned plea to the Caribbean Community at the meeting held on Thursday in Suriname. She told the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) that Haiti needed the support of its partners to continue to educate its current students as it currently had little capacity and few facilities to offer tertiary education. She said the January 12 earthquake crippled Port-au-Prince, leaving in its wake a death toll of around 200, 000 and had further weakened the education system.
Haiti has one State University with nearly 23,000 students. Each year 18,000 youth seek attendance at an undergraduate school but only 3,000 are admitted. The School of Nursing and the School of Human Sciences collapsed during the earthquake and several other buildings sustained damages. “It is likely that those students who escaped, will not only lose the rest of the academic year but their education and training might be disrupted for a longer period,” the release said, adding that this is likely to have a serious impact on the human capital so necessary for rebuilding the nation.
Cadet reiterated that though current efforts are focused on providing food, water and in the coming months and years, the most pressing issue will become the lack of qualified human resources to rebuild Haitian society, which will result from the generations of displaced students unable to access quality education during and following the crisis. In this regard, she called on COHSOD to impress upon Heads of Government the need to provide at least 20 scholarships per year for the next five years (starting in Fall 2010) for Haitian students to attend the University of the West Indies (UWI). In addition, she expressed hope that UWI would be more ‘flexible’ in enrolling Haitian students during this special disaster relief effort.
Cadet also urged Caricom to develop a mechanism that would help youth in Haiti to access funding for entrepreneurship for instance, through the Caribbean Development Bank while receiving support and mentoring from the State University of Haiti and the private sector.
