The Acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Fiji, Professor Shaista Shameem says the National Development Plan and the Ministry of Education’s Strategic Plan needs to be revised. Professor Shameem highlighted this during a press conference following the high-level roundtable conference at the university’s Saweni Campus in Lautoka on Friday.

She said both the National Development Plan and the Ministry of Education’s Strategic Plan needed to be revised given the situation the majority of people faced now because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said the roundtable was designed to have the views of the different communities like school teachers, non-government organisations, religious groups, organisations involved in higher education or education itself and other stakeholders to discuss where Fiji was going as an economy in the future.

“We wanted to have a conversation with our community as a result of the TSLB (Tertiary Scholarship and Loans Board) giving us the opportunity to see how the human resource needs of the country should be planned for the next ten years,” Professor Shameem said.

“The old development plans that we are in right now obviously doesn’t give the answer to the problem because that development plan was formulated pre-COVID.

“Now we have a National Development Plan that we need to revise and also the Ministry of Education’s Strategic Plan also needs to be revised given the situation that we are in where everyone’s facing very difficult circumstances economically, people have lost jobs.”

She added that COVID-19 had created huge stress on the resources of the state and on families.

“It is economic growth that provides jobs and it is economic growth at the end of the day that tells us where we should put our attention to when it comes to higher education and that was the intention of our roundtable,” the Vice-Chancellor said.

“We know how many of our students and parents have lost jobs, how much they are struggling, how difficult it is even for them to access the classes to come to school because they don’t have bus fare and food on the table.

“That is why we wanted to give the opportunity to community groups to tell us and therefore we tell the TSLB to examine exactly where the economic growth will be in the future and where Government should be putting money so that we can educate students in order for them to get a good livelihood in the future.”

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