The UWI Guild of Stu­dents and U-Re­port Trinidad and To­ba­go have signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU) aimed at pro­vid­ing a dig­i­tal plat­form for stu­dents to have a voice.

U-Re­port is a UNICEF-man­aged pro­gramme that is de­signed for com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pa­tion among youths, al­low­ing them to voice their opin­ions and ideas.

The sign­ing was held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus yes­ter­day, dur­ing the uni­ver­si­ty’s first day of phys­i­cal learn­ing fol­low­ing a two-year hia­tus due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Speak­ing dur­ing the event, UWI Guild pres­i­dent Kobe Sandy said the part­ner­ship was crit­i­cal for stu­dents at the in­sti­tu­tion.

“U-re­port is prob­a­bly one of the largest youth net­works in the world. And we will be us­ing the Guild of stu­dents as a body to rep­re­sent about over thir­teen thou­sand stu­dents who we will en­cour­age to be a part of the U-re­port sys­tem. So, of course, as I said be­fore, raise the stan­dard of ad­vo­ca­cy, ac­tivism and, of course, stu­dent growth go­ing for­ward,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to U-Re­port’s web­site, the free so­cial mon­i­tor­ing tool us­es polls to col­lect re­spons­es re­flect­ing the opin­ions of young peo­ple on a va­ri­ety of so­cial prob­lems and is­sues.

U-Re­port co-or­di­na­tor Camille Bethel said the pro­gramme is used world­wide and has over 25 mil­lion young peo­ple on the plat­form cur­rent­ly. Not­ing just how ac­ces­si­ble U-Re­port is to stu­dents at the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus and oth­er youths lo­cal­ly, Bethel said, “It’s an open-source mo­bile plat­form you record and it al­lows young peo­ple to eas­i­ly ac­cess the polls and to have their voic­es heard on is­sues that are im­por­tant to them.”

Bethel said the sign­ing of the MoU with the UWI Guild was done in the hope that young peo­ple on cam­pus will re­alise the im­por­tance and the pow­er their voic­es have in ini­ti­at­ing change.