No opening date yet for UWI Penal/Debe campus

AKASH SAMA­ROO

Lead Ed­i­tor – Pol­i­tics

There is still no con­crete open­ing date for UWI’s Pe­nal/Debe cam­pus, but Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Min­is­ter Pro­fes­sor Prakash Per­sad says prepa­ra­tions are well un­der­way for a full launch of­fer­ing pre-uni­ver­si­ty, un­der­grad­u­ate and post­grad­u­ate pro­grammes.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee’s ex­am­i­na­tion of Bud­get 2027, Per­sad out­lined progress on the cam­pus but did not say when stu­dents would be­gin class­es.

The bud­get pro­pos­es $60 mil­lion for cam­pus re­fur­bish­ment, along with a sep­a­rate $2.661 mil­lion for a new ac­cess road link­ing the cam­pus to the Sir Solomon Ho­choy High­way.

“Work to­wards open­ing of the UWI Pe­nal Debe cam­pus is well un­der­way,” Per­sad said.

He said prepa­ra­tions cov­ered both the phys­i­cal fa­cil­i­ties and the aca­d­e­m­ic of­fer­ings re­quired to bring the cam­pus in­to op­er­a­tion.

“Not on­ly in the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture that has been re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed but al­so the ed­u­ca­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture, so that stu­dents will have ac­cess to a va­ri­ety of aca­d­e­m­ic pro­grammes of na­tion­al rel­e­vance, span­ning pre-uni­ver­si­ty, un­der­grad­u­ate, and post­grad­u­ate stud­ies.”

Per­sad said the cam­pus would open ful­ly rather than through a lim­it­ed or phased launch.

“And there­fore, when the cam­pus opens, it will be a full open­ing, not a so-called prac­ti­cal one,” he said.

He al­so linked the cam­pus’s open­ing to end­ing what he de­scribed as “ge­o­graph­ic dis­crim­i­na­tion” in ac­cess to ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion.

How­ev­er, he did not iden­ti­fy the pro­grammes to be of­fered, in­di­cate the ex­pect­ed stu­dent in­take or pro­vide a time­line for com­plet­ing prepa­ra­tions.

The Draft Es­ti­mates of De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme Ex­pen­di­ture al­lo­cate $60 mil­lion for the re­fur­bish­ment of the Pe­nal/Debe cam­pus un­der Per­sad’s min­istry.

This is $10 mil­lion less than the $70 mil­lion orig­i­nal­ly bud­get­ed for 2026, which was re­tained in the re­vised es­ti­mates.

Sep­a­rate­ly, the In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Fund al­lo­cates $2.661 mil­lion for con­struc­tion of a con­nec­tor road link­ing the Sir Solomon Ho­choy High­way to UWI’s South Cam­pus in Debe.