Regional Education Programme for Animal Health Assistants

• Author: Duke Pollard
• Profession: Sitting senior judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), the highest appellate municipal court of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
• Pages: 852-862

852 THE CARICOM SYSTEM

35

THE CARIBBEAN REGIONAL CENTRE

FOR THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING OF

ANIMAL HEALTH AND VETERINARY

PUBLIC HEALTH ASSISTANTS

The preambular paragraphs of the Agreement establishing the Caribbean Regional

Centre for the Education and Training of Animal Health and Veterinary Public Health

Assistants confirm that some of the considerations informing the initiative to establish

the Centre were a shortage of veterinary manpower resources to protect animal health,

the expansion of the livestock industry through augumentation of relevant human

resources and the desire to be self-sufficient in protein of animal origin. The stated

objectives of the Centre include improvement in the qualify of life in the Region by

ensuring an adequate supply of trained personnel to satisfy the human resources needs

of animal health services in the Region; reduction in reliance on extra-regional

programmes for the training of animal and veterinary public health personnel; and

making more effective use of scarce veterinary medical resources in the Region and the

provision of consultancy services to the Member States.

REPAHA commenced as a cooperative endeavour among various donor

organisations and Member States of the Caribbean Community including the UNDP,

PAHO/WHO, CIDA, CFTC, EDF and the following participating Governments, namely,

Anguilla, Antigua, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands,

Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, the Netherlands Antilles, St. Lucia,

St. Christopher-Nevis, St. Vincent, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Centre

had a protracted development beginning with a resolution adopted by the Ministers of

Agriculture of the hemisphere at the Fourth Inter-American Meeting on Foot and Mouth

Disease and Zoonoses held in Peru in 1971 when a resolution was unanimously adopted

to urge Governments to evaluate veterinary manpower resources and to establish relevant

training programmes. Similar resolutions were adopted at the Fifth and Sixth Inter-

American Meetings in Mexico in 1972 and Colombia in 1973. Following the meeting

in Colombia, PAHO assembled a team of experts funded by UNDP to determine the

needs of countries in the Caribbean for veterinary manpower resources. The Conference

of Ministers of Health of the Caribbean that convened in Georgetown, Guyana, in

1972 endorsed the need for an appropriate institution for the training of animal health

and veterinary medical personnel. The Centre opened its doors in 1975 and has so far

trained 467 assistants.