University of Guyana now accredited for the first time

Last Updated on Monday, 20 January 2025, 16:43 by Writer

The University of Guyana (UG) was Monday formally accredited for the first time in its 61-year-old existence, fulfilling 16.5 of the 17 standards and paving the way for that tertiary institution’s transfer of credits to be easily recognised by other universities in the Caribbean, officials said.

The assessment of the Turkeyen and Tain campuses as well as the Institute for Distance and Continuing of Education’s (IDCE) Georgetown, Linden and New Amsterdam locations was done by an external committee under the chairmanship of former executive Director of the National Accreditation Council of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Michael Bradshaw. The other representatives were also from Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica.

“I want the world to know that this accreditation was not an incestuous approach where persons right from within Guyana came and put a stamp of approval. But these persons, they were external to this country,” said Executive Director of Guyana’s National Accreditation Council (NAC), Dr Marcel Hutson.

Dr Hutson said the accreditation is valid for five years.

Dr Hutson and the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Dr Emmanuel Cummings said UG’s accreditation now positions that institution within the context of the Caribbean Community’s Treaty of Chaguaramas. “If your institution is not accredited, they will not be accepted as a transfer student. They cannot come with their credits. Now that University of Guyana will achieve institutional accreditation, it means that credits from the recipient can be transferable to other institutions within the region as part of the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas,” Cummings said.

The NAC Executive Director, in particular, singled out the contribution of UG’s Vice Chancellor (VC), Professor Paloma Mohammed-Martin to the institution. VC Mohammed-Martin explained that the reason that UG did not score .5 to achieve the perfect score of 17 was because the 1970 Mission Statement did not align with current realities and so the new UG Council would have to make the necessary changes. “The evaluators thought that the university was doing much more than its present mission statement,” she said.

Dr Mohammed-Martin said the assessment team conducted a thorough job. “It’s a whole university exercise. These people don’t come here and speak only to us. They speak to students, they speak to clients, they speak, they dig up everything. If this is what you say you’re doing, they dig it up. They say, Bring the minutes. Bring, bring, bring the data. They go and talk to the people. If you call somebody’s name, they go and they check these people,” Dr Mohammed-Martin said.

The Vice Chancellor said “very quietly” over the past four or five years, UG has been climbing in international ranking placing at 3,017, and the aim is to get into the top global 200 over the next four to five years. “That’s where we should be, because you cannot say that you’re a world class country without a world class university, and we have to indeed deliver and stand on standards. Nobody, anybody who knows this administration of the university knows we don’t play, we accept our problems and we fix them,” she said.

Separately, UG’s School of Medicine has been accredited.

From 2025, the Guyana government has taken over funding of UG’s operations amounting to more than GY$13.1 billion.