The University of the West Indies: Turning Research into Industry

An interview with Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor, The University of the West Indies

Confronted with the need to generate a significant share of its own operating income, The University of the West Indies has turned a financial challenge into an opportunity, transforming itself into an entrepreneurial institution converting its research into a pipeline of commercial products ready for the global market. Under Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, the Caribbean's top-ranked university is now producing some of the region's most exciting innovations—from Sargassum biofuels to anti-diabetic beverages, revived cocoa industries, and construction sealants—and is actively seeking ethical global partners to help take them to scale.

---

Innovation Report: How would you describe the identity of The University of the West Indies and its role within the CARICOM region's economic and scientific development?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: The University of the West Indies is a unique institution, rooted in the Caribbean world. It is a product of the post-colonial Caribbean in search of economic development, political democracy, and social justice. It is the leading instrument in that development discourse, producing the knowledge and perspectives, the teaching and learning, to bring the Caribbean forward into postmodernity.

It is unique in the sense that it is a regional federal university. It is funded as a public university by 17 sovereign governments. It is not located in any one state—it is scattered across the Caribbean with five campuses. I am arguably the only university president in the world who is answerable to 17 prime ministers.

Innovation Report: How does that governance structure work in practice?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: On the board of governors, 17 Caribbean governments sit as members, shareholders, and stakeholders. It is a collectively funded project by all of these separate nations. Our first campus was in Jamaica, our second in Trinidad, our third in Barbados, and our fourth in Antigua. We also have an online campus for students who cannot attend a physical campus. It is quite a project in innovation in how nations can collaborate and cooperate to achieve a collective objective.

We have 50,000 students scattered across our five campuses, and we are ranked as the number one university in the Caribbean. There are over 95 institutions of higher learning in the Caribbean, but the University of the West Indies is ranked by Times Higher Education as the top one. We are ranked in the top 3.5% of all global universities, and there are 35,000 universities in the world. From the perspective of quality, we are a global elite university—but we are not an elitist university.

Our philosophy is open access. The vast majority of our students are from the working class, and access is a critical pillar on which we have built our university. By strategy, we are an activist university. What I mean by that is we identify the top 10 challenges facing the Caribbean world, and then we throw ourselves deeply into the conversation to provide the teaching, the research, to shape policy, and to provide a platform for advocacy around those challenges.

Innovation Report: Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our era. What has been UWI's role in leading research and advocacy in this field?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: We were among the first universities in the world that had an institute dedicated to climate change—48 years ago. We were among, if not the first, whistleblower to say, "Listen, we have rising sea temperatures in the Caribbean Sea, we have rising sea levels," and we have been able to map that over four decades: the disappearance of beaches, the corrosion of the maritime and physical environment. We produced a tremendous amount of research on the destruction of coral reefs and the erratic migration of fish around the Caribbean Sea and beyond.

As a result, we were invited to the first meeting in Paris—we were there at the Paris Accord. We were in Glasgow for that meeting also. When the International Association of Universities, which is over 200 universities, selected a leading voice on climate change studies, they selected the University of the West Indies. We were given the responsibility of putting together a team of other universities and providing the leadership for advocacy on climate change. We are globally recognised to be at the centre of that conversation.

Innovation Report: Public health is another area in which UWI has earned international recognition, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. What role did the university play, and how has that shaped your international partnerships?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: The Caribbean has had a tremendous experience with pandemics and viral-driven diseases. We were celebrated by the international community for our leadership in suppressing the spread and mortality effect of COVID-19. When we looked to our north and saw the devastation taking place in North America, and also in Mexico, in Brazil—the large countries in our neighbourhood—our university took an activist position. We mobilised the medical community: doctors, nurses, paramedics. We took to the airwaves and provided a tremendous amount of public education so that all citizens could understand the nature of this virus.

We rolled out a public strategy with our governments across the Caribbean, and as a result we had arguably the lowest death rates from the coronavirus. At the end of that, I was able to say as Vice-Chancellor that while we are 78 years old as a university, those two or three years of the coronavirus were our best years. Why? Because our activism and education saved thousands of lives, and you cannot expect more from any university. The governments of the region all celebrated the university for what it achieved in the management of that pandemic.

As a result, we now have a research partnership with the State University of New York—the SUNY-UWI Institute for Public Health. SUNY is one of the biggest universities in the world, and we now have a joint teaching and research project in virology and pandemic management. Imagine, this small Caribbean university now in full open partnership with one of the largest universities in the world to provide strategies and information in virology and how to detect and manage the spread of deadly viruses.

Innovation Report: How have you built international partnerships across Africa, beginning with the University of Johannesburg?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: Our activist approach has enabled us to build bonds all across the world with universities that have similar relationships. We have a joint centre with the University of Johannesburg focusing on Global Africa. Africa is emerging out of its colonisation, building very progressive democratic states, and there are millions of African peoples all across the world. I am speaking to you from Jamaica, and 95% of the people of Jamaica are from West Africa. The two universities got together and now offer a joint master's programme in Global Africa—how all of the African countries around the world and African communities come together and partner for economic development, political education, and to give the younger generation a sense of mobility.

Innovation Report: Your partnership with the University of Glasgow has a particularly powerful historical dimension. How was that collaboration formed, and what has it produced?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: Historical research showed that the University of Glasgow was a very significant receiver of funds and endowments from the slavery system. Many Scottish slave owners in the Caribbean—Jamaica especially—wanted their sons to go back to Scotland for a university education. The sons of the slave owners in Jamaica and Barbados received their higher education at the University of Glasgow, which was building a reputation as one of the finest medical schools in Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

When the Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow reached out and we met, we said: history is what it is. The Caribbean provided a lot of the financial support for the University of Glasgow to make it what it is, and the university was deeply embedded in slavery. Why don't we recall that history and bring it together for the future? So we established the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research. We chose public health research because the vast majority of black people in the Caribbean are now victims of chronic diseases—diabetes, hypertension—and much of that has to do with their historical experiences. We need to get ahead and reverse this pandemic of chronic diseases.

Our researchers and theirs are working together. They have made laboratories available to our scientists, and we are now offering a joint master's degree—one of the few universities in the world that have a joint degree—a taught online master's in reparatory justice. Students anywhere in the world can sign up, and when they graduate, they receive two degrees: they become a graduate of Glasgow and a graduate of the University of the West Indies. Reparatory justice is a big subject in the world today: how to achieve democracy and equality in societies that were built on inequality. When the United Nations passed a resolution last week that child slavery was a crime against humanity, Glasgow and UWI were able to celebrate, because we have played a role in providing the education to let people understand.

Innovation Report: Why is a global vision so essential to UWI's identity, and how did your software engineering centre in China come about?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: This is the kind of university we have become. We are an activist university. We are a global university. And why do we have a global vision? It is simple: the Caribbean is the world's first global village. We have people in the Caribbean from all over the world—all the major civilisations. People don't often remember that Christopher Columbus left Europe and arrived in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean has not been the same since. Now we have African people, European people, Indian people, Chinese people. The University of the West Indies recognises that it is in a global racial village, and therefore it has to reflect that.

Wherever our people came from, we are going to be there. We will have a university centre in all of these centres of civilisation that have made the Caribbean what it is. We have a Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Affairs and an Institute for Global Affairs to carry UWI everywhere.

We have a centre in China—the University of the West Indies has a centre for software engineering in Suzhou. President Xi came to the Caribbean about eight or nine years ago and promised that China would help the Caribbean with technology development. I was there at the signing of that treaty between CARICOM and the government of China. Within three months, I was on a plane to Beijing saying to the Education Minister, "I am here to give effect to what the President of China has promised the people of the Caribbean. I am here to implement that promise." They asked what we wanted, and I said we want software engineering. We want to establish a centre for software engineering so that our students can travel to China to do their bachelor's degree. They said it would be done.

They chose Suzhou for us because Suzhou is the technology centre of China—it's like their Silicon Valley. The Global Institute of Software Technology and ourselves built this joint centre, and now we have students doing their software engineering degrees in China. It is what you call a two-plus-two programme: your first two years you are doing the foundations of software engineering at the University of the West Indies, and then you go to China for years three and four to complete your degree. Of course, you have to learn Mandarin before you leave the Caribbean, so when you arrive in China you are speaking Mandarin.

So we have North America, we have China, we have Africa, we have Europe. I think we are probably the most globalised university in the world—not only in terms of the openness of our curriculum, but actually with a physical infrastructure of partnerships all across the world. That is who we are, and we are very proud of that, because globalisation is critical to our innovation.

---

Innovation Report: We have already done some writing on the Sargassum project—a waste-to-biofuel initiative that has attracted significant international attention. What is your overall approach to creating industrial spin-offs and building ties with industry, and what drove the decision to become an entrepreneurial university?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: I will start from the beginning. We took a decision at the university 10 years ago that we must become the centre of the conversion of research into industrial and commercial capacity. The transition of our research into product is stage one, and then having that product scaled for regional impact is phase two. We have taken this matter very seriously.

The second pillar of our strategic plan—the first pillar being access—is alignment. We must align the research in the university with industrial capacity within the region. We must align with the local private sector and participate in the creation of the export potential of the region. This is built into our strategic plan.

We had to do this for two reasons. As I said, we are a publicly funded university, and the governments of the region have been having tremendous difficulty managing their own fiscal space and financial expectations. The university had to take on greater responsibility for self-financing to generate the resources it needs for its own development. The impetus meant that we had to transition to becoming an entrepreneurial university. Our target is that 30% of our operational costs should be covered by income generation through entrepreneurship. This is an existential issue facing us. All of our campuses have been given targets to meet in the conversion of research into innovation for commodification and commercialisation.

Innovation Report: Where does the Sargassum biofuel project stand today?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: That project was designed to create biofuels on which automobiles can function. We now have Sargassum cars—cars running on fuels extracted from the Sargassum seaweed. It took about five years of pretty hard work to generate the quality product, and now we have it: a Sargassum biofuel that, with the adjustment of the carburettor of standard cars, can be consumed instead of fossil fuels. We have demonstrated its efficiency. We are now at the stage where we are speaking about scale—finding the right partner to make the large-scale investment to move it out of our laboratories into the global market.

Innovation Report: What other flagship innovations have come out of UWI's research, beginning with the work on diabetes in Barbados?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: Another critical project comes from the Barbados campus, which also drove the Sargassum innovation. Barbados has now created an innovation to address the practical problem of reversing diabetes. 60% of all the people in the Caribbean over the age of 60 have either diabetes or hypertension or both. If you take the marker of chronic diseases, the black people in the Caribbean are the most unhealthy people in the world. We have a higher percentage of our population with that disease per capita than any in the world.

This is important because the image you might have of Caribbean people is athletic—they have the fastest man in the world, the fastest woman in the world, they're so good at cricket, so good at sport, people like Rihanna, beautiful people full of good health. But behind that image, we are the sickest people in the world when it comes to chronic diseases. The university had to get involved.

The Cave Hill campus—the Faculty of Medical Sciences and the Faculty of Science and Technology—came together and created a diabetic drink, a zero-sugar, zero-carbohydrate anti-diabetic drink that we now know will help people manage and push back their diabetes. We have a diabetic research centre on that campus working in partnership with the University of Newcastle. It received a substantial grant from Sir Richard Branson of Virgin to help the two universities find a way to reverse diabetes.

Cave Hill now has this diabetic drink. There are quite a few zero-sugar anti-diabetic drinks in the global market, but we have come up with a very effective, proven, and tested product—and with Caribbean flavours: mango, apple, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, the flavours of indigenous fruit. The science is solid. It is very good at reversing diabetes, helping you manage your sugar, and removing high-sugar drinks from your nutrition. We are now talking to one or two international beverage companies to take that product onto the global market.

Innovation Report: Trinidad has also contributed important commercial products. What is happening with the cocoa industry and the sealant project rooted in the island's natural history?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: There is an indigenous cocoa plant in Trinidad, and according to cocoa research, the cocoa pod has the highest concentration of cocoa of all the various products around the world. Most of the cocoa that goes into chocolate making is produced in Africa, but Trinidad has an old cocoa industry going back to the early years of colonisation, and we have revived that industry. We have a cocoa industry company on the campus that has driven the revitalisation. The campus went one step further and is now manufacturing dark chocolate—a dark chocolate that is lovely, very tasty, fantastic. We are at the stage of looking for a global partner to help us scale it.

You may know that Trinidad is an exporter of oil. On the island itself, there are lakes of oil bubbling up from the ground—a thick black tar called the Pitch Lake. The European colonisers would come to Trinidad to buy this tar because they found it was very good for sealing ships. If a ship had a crack, it had to be sealed before going back out to the ocean. They would buy this tar, and it was used as a sealant.

The campus has taken that history and knowledge and is now manufacturing a sealant. It can be used to seal any water-based problem—a leak on your roof, a problem with plumbing, leaking pipes. It is already marketed, and the construction industry is purchasing it to deal with issues of plumbing and roofing. This is another product that we are getting ready in stage two for global scale.

Innovation Report: What kind of partners are you now seeking to take these products to the world?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: There are many other areas where we have taken the research, the historical knowledge, commercialised it, created products, and we are now at this second stage where the university is looking for partners. We want ethical and moral partnerships with the owners of capital who can create an environment in which the university can prosper. So we are at this critical stage in our development.

---

Innovation Report: How is the university approaching digital transformation and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, both in education and across Caribbean industry?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: We do not have to look beyond our shores for examples of what to do. We are a university that has emerged out of a long history of taking responsibility for the emergence of civilisation into the 21st century. When we look at every stage in the development of technology, science, governance, and economic concepts over the last 100 years, we can see what we need to do to accommodate the current reality and the future. The history pushes you into the future—you don't have to be visionary or prophetic; the logic of things is happening all around you.

We are a society of islands. There are no group of islands in the world as open to global influence as the Caribbean. The Caribbean survives in a global environment—hundreds of islands, all influenced by international finance capital, all influenced by global geopolitics. We are on the periphery of the United States. All of these major forces shape us, including digital transformation.

Consider that our number one industry is tourism. How can you run a tourism industry that brings people from all over the world without a digital banking system, without a digital cash movement system? The very industry itself requires that you be in alignment with all the major developments. If you leave South Africa and come to the Caribbean, you want your credit cards to work. You want everything to work. You want to move money around and pay your hotel from elsewhere. All of that engagement is global engagement, and the university has to be at the centre of this. We say to the people: digital transformation. The university will drive the knowledge. We will be the main advocate. We say the same to industry: you have to digitise. Your efficiency, your profitability depends on your digital engagement. If you don't do that, you lose market share.

Innovation Report: How do you view both the opportunities and the risks that artificial intelligence presents for the Caribbean, and what new institutes is UWI establishing to lead the region's AI agenda?

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles: How is information generated in these small islands? We do not have control over global information. We do not have global television networks. We are exposed to the globalisation of information—it is in our living rooms, in our offices, everywhere. Therefore, we have to be on top of it to create our own narrative. We have to be in a position to say, "This is the Caribbean's narrative." AI is clearly a critical tool.

On one hand, what AI does is also reaffirm the old prejudices of the world, because AI pulls together information as it exists, summarises it, and gives you a good essay—but it makes tremendous mistakes and reproduces old prejudices. One of my students did an essay on my historical work, and AI described me as a female because of my name. "Professor Hillary Beckles, she said this and she said that"—that was the AI essay, because it read my name as female. We have to be on top of our own narrative, and AI is important.

We have just established on our campus in Antigua an institute for AI and public education. We already have institutes on our campuses driving our engagement with AI and extracting the benefits from it. The largest financial company in the Caribbean is called Sagicor. Sagicor Financial Services has just agreed with the University of the West Indies to establish the Sagicor-UWI Institute for AI and Financial Services. We are going to be out there on the frontier with an institute on our campuses funded by Sagicor to generate the skills and knowledge necessary to run a state-of-the-art financial services industry.

They recognise as corporate leaders that they have skin in this game—that they need to have workers and future workers absolutely in fidelity with AI. They have come to us and said, "Let us build out this institute to train the next generation of students, to retrain our own staff, and let the university be the hub for AI skills development for financial services." These are important steps we have to take. We have positioned ourselves as an activist university, and the region is in need of digital transformation and AI skills. The expectation is that the university would jump right in there and say, "This is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to do it. Can we partner?" Now we have our largest public company partnered with us to move into this frontier.

---