Sascha Wil­son

Sci­ence Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim is call­ing for three lead­ing ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions to in­tro­duce free on­line ed­u­ca­tion. De­liv­er­ing an ad­dress at the launch of the T&T En­tre­pre­neur­ial Spring­board Pro­gramme (TTE­SP) at San Fer­nan­do City Hall Au­di­to­ri­um on Sat­ur­day, Karim said the de­vel­op­ment of brain­pow­er was key to a more pro­duc­tive work­force.

He ap­pealed to the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T, UWI and Costaatt to put cours­es avail­able free of charge on the In­ter­net to cit­i­zens of T&T and peo­ple around the world who wish to join.Say­ing T&T was the Car­ni­val cap­i­tal and in­dus­tri­al cap­i­tal with 100 years in oil pro­duc­tion, he said, "We are world lead­ers and his­to­ry-mak­ers and we must al­so lead in terms of ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing."

Karim said he has al­so man­dat­ed all in­sti­tu­tions un­der his watch to en­sure that three ad­di­tion­al mod­ules and elec­tives are avail­able to every stu­dent in the new aca­d­e­m­ic year. He said it would be manda­to­ry for stu­dents to pur­sue life skills cours­es."Learn how to live, learn how to leave a lega­cy, learn how to love, learn how to re­late to peo­ple, learn how to learn. Many of us don't know how to learn, we take this for grant­ed."

In ad­di­tion, he said, every stu­dent would be ex­posed to in­for­ma­tion­al and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy.Urg­ing en­tre­pre­neurs to seize the op­por­tu­ni­ty avail­able to them through TTE­SP, Karim said the way busi­ness is done in T&T must be changed."We have to ease the way that we do busi­ness. We have to re­move bu­reau­cra­cies and im­prove fa­cil­i­ties...the re­moval of the busi­ness frus­tra­tion in­dex to­wards the cre­ation of the busi­ness fa­cil­i­ty in­dex.

Warn­ing that those who do not cre­ate jobs would soon be out of jobs, he said an en­tre­pre­neur must be an idea gen­er­a­tion fac­to­ry.The pro­gramme is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts (Costaatt) and The Boston Pledge (TBP), of Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, to pro­vide an ed­u­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive in the area of en­tre­pre­neur­ship and small busi­ness de­vel­op­ment.