On July, 31, 2023, in their last official act as Principal and Deputy Principal, Professors Dale Webber and Ian Boxill along with Campus Registrar Dr. Donovan Stanberry signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat which will allow 25 Ghanaians the opportunity to study at The UWI Mona.
 
Signing on behalf of the Ghanaian Government was Ms. Afua Gaisie, the Deputy Registrar for the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat. This signing ceremony was hosted following a meeting with members of The UWI’s senior administration team who welcomed Ms. Gaisie to the Mona Campus.
 
Ms. Gaisie’s visit is the culmination of a series of events which began with the Campus Registrar’s visit to Ghana between May 22nd and June 16th earlier this year. During his visit, Dr. Stanberry engaged with a number of stakeholders including the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat meeting with GSS Registrar, Dr. Kingsley Agyemang on May 25th.
 
During that meeting, the Campus Registrar was able to secure commitments from GSS that would see them funding the tuition for Ghanaian students to study at The UWI Mona. The Ghana Scholarship Secretariat expressed an interest in sending students in Medicine, Computer Science, Agriculture, and Sport to study at the Mona Campus. Both teams worked quickly towards the goal of welcoming students from Ghana in September 2023. The 5-year agreement stipulates that GSS commits to sending 25 students, 15 students will earn scholarships to pursue Medical degrees while 10 scholarships from a list of varied programmes in the other areas in which students expressed an interest. Further, it was suggested that scholarship numbers may increase in the years to come.
 
In his address to the members of both delegations, Dr. Stanberry credited Professor Boxill as the inspiration for the idea to looking to the continent of Africa for scholarship prospects and thanked the GSS for their alacrity in making it possible for the first cohort of Ghanaians to begin in September of 2023.
 
Ms. Gaisie thanked the members of the senor administration team and voiced excitement ahead of her tour of the campus with emphasis on seeing the Faculty of Medical Sciences. She spoke of Ghana’s links to Jamaica as a progenitor of the Pan-African diaspora. She mentioned some facts on the history of her office as a part of the office of the President of Ghana and went on to discuss previous successful links to scholarships for programmes in Cuba and their expectations of even more success of future graduates noting Jamaica’s prowess in local, regional and international sport as a driving factor for interest in programmes in that area.
 
The outgoing Principal emphasized the value of having a Scholarship secretariat in the office of the President and the contextual inference that as a nation, Ghana, has demonstrated a dedication to learning as a means of nation building. Professor Webber went on to emphasize the value of being a research based institution and how that translates to real world teaching and solutions. In discussing this, Professor Webber noted anecdotally his conversation with Ms.Gaisie about our local Sargassum problems with its possible origin rooted off the coast in Ghana. By identifying this, Prof Webber said, “we may be better able to solve the problem at the source.” The anecdote demonstrated how we are inextricably linked as nations.
 
Therefore, it follows that Ghana’s nation building by providing these 25 scholarships builds both nations for the next five years and, perhaps even more in the years to come. The UWI welcomes new Pelicans from Ghana in September of this year.