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Kudos to Mona School of Business
Friday, June 26, 2009
We laud the University of the West Indies' Mona School of Business for hosting the International Telecommunications Society's first Caribbean Regional Conference and hope that the Government will make good on its word to consider the recommendations coming from the confab.
For it is via the innovations of information communications technology (ICT), coupled with a return to values and attitudes based on common decency, that this society will progress out of its current malaise.
That's the bottom line.
The rest - the return to a relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and all the other measures that are being taken in the name of national development - must, of necessity, be premised on the sustainability and efficiency that the telecommunications and other related industries have to offer.
And according to information coming out of the conference which started on Tuesday and which ends today, there is a great deal in terms of creativity that the telecommunications industry can lend to the quality of our lives, from the creation of additional spaces for educational opportunities to crime reduction.
It goes without saying that the importance of this cannot be over-emphasised, as uneducated populaces are becoming increasingly marginalised within the context of the rather impersonal reality of globalisation.
There is just not that much room for the ignorant and uninformed anymore.
Those who refuse to move out of dying professions into more efficient paradigms are simply going to get left behind as others get their jobs done - more efficiently - with the merest fraction of time and effort.
So, as the conference participants wind up their deliberations today, we look forward to the results which are sure to impact on several pressing issues, including the consequences of the digital divide, because the trek towards progress must be inclusive if we are to truly benefit.
We look forward to experiencing new ways of trading, learning and essentially living in a world which, despite its many social, economic and psychological challenges, still has a lot to offer.
In the meantime, we would urge those who have not yet done so to start paying some serious attention to the role that the ICT industry can play, not just in their own lives, but in the lives of those to whom they relate.
For, as the Reverend Sam Green pointed out recently, education is not about personal aggrandisement. It is about lifting the society through an understanding of the issues that impact it.
History is awash with examples of how a failure to facilitate personal development and that of others has impacted negatively on the society as a whole. Right here in our own backyard, the crime statistics - which are a derivative of ignorance and poverty - as well as other statistics relating to the social disasters such as early unwanted pregnancies, preventable contractions of deadly sexually transmitted diseases and illiteracy, are staring us in the face.
It would suit us to meet those stares with the solutions that the ICT industry has to offer.
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