GUYANA

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin

Vice-Chancellor | University of Guyana

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin Sets Out An Exciting Vision For the Future of Education in Guyana

“We have been mostly a teaching university up to now, but within the last 10 years, we have been trying very hard to get past the fundamental work of training the nation’s and Caribbean’s workforce to really get into problem-solving, higher-level research partnerships, innovation, and even entrepreneurship.”

Key Points:

The University of Guyana has historically been development-focused, dedicated to serving national and regional problems, but is now undergoing a steady transformation to become a center of excellence for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
The university has created a blueprint with four aspirational goals for 2040, including having at least one graduate per household, becoming a research center of excellence in nine areas, creating a problem-solving center for Guyana and the region, and being a model for the nation by producing successful citizens.
Flagship projects include the medical school's biopharmaceutical research, the Institute for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship's 300+ industry-applicable projects, the upcoming Marine Institute "Water Worlds" to study Guyana's rivers and develop training for the offshore oil and gas industry, and the RASSR pilot accelerating children in STEM fields.
The University of Guyana is incorporating indigenous knowledge into its research and future planning, opening a unique campus in the forest to serve remote indigenous communities and work collaboratively with them to document and apply their knowledge to problem-solving.
The University of Guyana is embracing technology and AI, having created the first AI policy for university use in the region, and is testing virtual and augmented reality for innovative training to bring young people back into the workforce.

Innovation Report: What do you believe makes up the DNA of the University of Guyana?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: The DNA of the University of Guyana definitely has to do with its historical roots as the state university that was created to help develop the country. We have been development-focused for most of our 60-year history. Our DNA has to do with dedicated service and focus on national and regional problems, but increasingly, those problems are global.

We have been mostly a teaching university up to now, but within the last 10 years, we have been trying very hard to get past the fundamental work of training the nation’s and Caribbean’s workforce to really get into problem-solving, higher-level research partnerships, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. The university is undergoing a massive transformation based on our dynamic blueprint document created between 2017 and 2022.

Innovation Report: How does one take a university from having a teaching focus to start building the infrastructure to imagine a larger challenge and develop research that can inform policy and drive innovation in the country? Where will you focus your energies?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: When I became chairman of the transitional management committee in 2019, I started a process of strategic visioning for the university because we were looking at a rapidly changing country and world. We were facing challenges like migration from neighboring states and climate refugees from other Caribbean countries, as well as what the new oil and gas industry was going to do. We were also looking at gold, rare earths, water, and how to reconcile being an environmentally responsible state with all the extractive work going on.

We looked at indigenous knowledge, the changes in the social space, and how the university could respond to social problems and emerging issues like zoonotic diseases. We also had the challenge of the university’s footprint being mostly along the coast, with not enough representation of students from some of the interior regions.

We created our blueprint with four aspirational goals to accomplish by 2040:

1. At least one university graduate per household.
2. Become a center of excellence for research in nine specific areas, including agriculture, sustainable infrastructure, energy, preservation of ancient knowledge, big data, health systems, human resiliency systems, climate and environment.
3. Create a center for solving the specific problems of Guyana and the region.
4. Create successful citizens who are fit for purpose and models for our nation.

The new institutes we’ve created, like the Institute for Human Resilience, Strategic Security, and the Future, are designed to work in a multidisciplinary way on specific problems for Guyana, the region, and the globe. This institute runs an innovative pilot called RASSR (Regional Accelerator for Stem Students Readiness), where we’ve taken 100 children, 10 from each of Guyana’s 10 regions, with the highest grades in maths and science. About a third of these children are indigenous. We’re accelerating them one year ahead of their cohorts to see if they would be interested in staying in STEM fields, with the goal of producing 50 new engineers and scientists for the workforce a year ahead of time. We’ve not lost a single child, and 76% are choosing to stay in STEM fields. It’s an exciting project for the future.

Innovation Report: How are you incorporating indigenous knowledge into your research and the future of the nation?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: One of the new institutes we created is the Institute for Food and Nutrition Security, which focuses on understanding how to use arable lands for agriculture, incorporating technology into farming, especially in indigenous regions that were never really brought into the national scheme for large-scale agriculture due to land titling issues.

A lot of indigenous knowledge has to do with using plants as medicine, preservatives, and so on. We’re also looking at this through our Center for Biodiversity Research, Faculty for Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Faculty for Natural Sciences.

The most exciting thing is that we’re opening a campus in the forest in an indigenous area, serving 21 indigenous groups in a remote location near the Brazilian border. This serves our objective of bringing more indigenous people into our classrooms, but also to serve them, work with their knowledge, and help them solve their problems in their situations. They’ll work on things like water studies, tourism, mineralogy, jewellery design, and, indigenous pharmacology, sustainable livelihoods on that campus.

We have special programs for supporting indigenous students. Some of them are lawyers working on their own land issues and titling problems. We work collaboratively with these communities to document what they know, bring that into the public domain as far as they want us to, and give that information back to them so they can work with others to solve their own community problems. This campus in the forest project is one-of-a-kind, and we’ll have to work through an iterative process to see how it emerges, as we don’t have too many examples in the world where this has been done.

Innovation Report: What do you consider the flagship projects at the University of Guyana to be, or other projects that are important to communicate or open for building partnerships to scale up in the future?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: Our medical school is definitely considered a major flagship project. They’re working on a lot of biopharmaceutical research at the undergraduate level and are now looking for partners to ramp up that research and bring projects to market.

We also have the Institute for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, where the research of our staff and students is taken in, scaled up, patented, or supported for future development. They have over 300 projects that can be examined for industry use.

We’re launching our Marine Institute called “Water Worlds,” as Guyana has 365 rivers that we’ve not studied at a high academic level for their biodiversity, deposits, security, and now for our offshore oil and gas work. We need to rapidly develop training and projects around port management and related areas.

We’re working with international partners to get these programs going in Guyana, but the infrastructure for training around this area is not cheap. It’s not just about theory; it’s about making sure you have the right, safe environment for training.

Innovation Report: How is the University of Guyana supporting the development of the oil and gas industry and ensuring the country’s progress remains sustainable and equitable?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: Oil and gas is not just about production in a country like ours. It has an impact on almost every sector due to the long value chain and spin-off industries. We participated in a study that examined five of 17 key sectors in regard to labor force, and in every single one of the five sectors studied – agriculture, infrastructure, health, transportation and logistics, and oil and gas itself – we’re looking at a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 additional workers needed over the next five years.

The university is working in several ways to address this:

1. Participating in research
2. Training in over 70 disciplines including local engineers (all engineers employed in the country are ours)
3. Tripling the number of engineers we produce
4. Expanding our labs to train more people
5. Introducing 16 new programs, from applied petroleum engineering to supply chain management, procurement, oil and gas auditing
6. Creating the Institute for Energy Diplomacy to specialize in research and bolt-on degrees
7. Supplying interns and the biggest supply of higher education to the industry
8. Looking at curricula with other universities, including in aviation
9. Shifting into STEM, but also everything needed to support not just oil and gas, but all the flourishing adjunct sectors

Innovation Report: When you take a step back and look at the wider picture of development in the nation, how confident are you at present in the future of Guyana’s national development? Can you give a score between 0 and 10?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: I would not want to use the word “confidence,” although as a researcher, we know confidence levels have to be above 0.5. I would say I’m hopeful. Many other Guyanese would have to be hopeful about the prospects for Guyana, given its context and what we are learning about the ability of our natural resources to be turned into wealth, which is phenomenal.

However, we have to be very careful about what we choose to do with that wealth. Guyana has been in a situation for many years where everything was needed, so we really have to be intentional and careful about a nuanced, cohesive, comprehensive program that takes in the infrastructure, the natural, social and perhaps even the economic and political ecology of the country right now.

The focus is on infrastructure, which appears to be the way to support other industries that will bring more wealth. But I think on the social side, we need to pay a little bit more attention to what people are thinking, feeling and needing.

If I were to give the hopeful score, it would be a 10, and the confidence score might be 7. It’s still early days. Our oil discovery was in 2015, we went into production in 2019, and it’s now 2024. This is less than 7-8 years into the first cycle, so it’s at a point now where you can calibrate the expectations, the needs, and the imperatives. I would not be too pessimistic at all. If we get to year 10 or 12 and we’re not correcting and being responsive, then I would say we’d have to revisit the score, but right now, there are still high hopes.

Innovation Report: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the University of Guyana’s work or vision for the future?

Prof. Paloma Mohamed Martin: We are a University facing the future. Leapfrogging from a fairly conservative past into a technology adaptive and receptive education environment. For instance, The University of Guyana created its own AI policy for the use of AI in our university, the first in the region, about six to eight months ago. We were very proud of this pioneering work to respond to ChatGPT and all these things, and to respond positively and proactively to the reality that this is how the future of the world is going to be shaped.

If we are going to be teaching people, we cannot make them afraid of it or punish them for using emerging technology . We have to figure out how to reengineer what the university is doing and how we are teaching. One of the major things we are going to be doing soon, though we haven’t publicly launched it, is using virtual and augmented reality for training in certain types of processes, especially to bring young people who have dropped out of the workforce back into training and hopefully into productive use of their lives. This is an international partnership that we have as well.

We’re embracing technology in all of this, and it’s going to be really significant to talk about in what we have to offer. This is a very exciting prospect, what we’re doing at the University of Guyana.