A Barbados Water Academy is to be established at the Barbados Community College to supplement ongoing efforts to teach Barbadians to be good water conservationists, given the island’s water scarcity situation.
Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley made the announcement on Wednesday, as she delivered the feature address during the Water is Life Caribbean Water Conference, at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Ms. Mottley shared with regional and overseas stakeholders and those online, that Principal of the Caribbean Institute for Metrology and Hydrology, Dr. David Farrell, is to be the Chairman of the Academy’s Advisory Committee.
She said the aim of the academy is to transform behaviours, improve skills and to develop a cadre of water monitors, some under 10-years-old, to educate their relatives and friends about the dangers of water wastage.
“This is not highly academic and esoteric – a middle class thing. This has to be a mass-based movement of water monitors telling the person in the house, ‘you hear don’t leave on the pipe when you brushing your teeth; turn it off!’; right back to harassing people, ‘why you ain’t change the toilet yet to the one that flushes less; it doesn’t use up as much water’.
“We want them to speak in the language that people understand…to transform the behaviour, not because the Government wants to look good, or the water authorities want a better bottom line, but because water is life for that household,” Mottley stressed.
The Prime Minister also stated that the academy would offer specialised training to equip persons with the scientific and engineering skills needed by the Barbados Water Authority, as the country seeks to come up with new ways of tackling the water crisis.
She reminded the audience that Barbados, like other countries in the region, was facing a groundwater crisis that needed to be addressed urgently.
“We roll off from the tip of our tongues that some of the most water-scarce countries in the world are found in this region…. The reality is that the other difficult conversation we need to have is to begin to confront the things that we have done for decades or centuries that can no longer be sustained,” Ms. Mottley said.
The two-day conference was organised by the United States Agency for International Development, in collaboration with the Ministry of Transport, Works and Water Resources.(PR/GIS)
