The Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) has tak­en bold steps to ad­vance both so­cial in­clu­sion and en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty with the sign­ing of two strate­gic Mem­o­ran­da of Un­der­stand­ing (MoUs). The agree­ments, made with the Trinidad and To­ba­go As­so­ci­a­tion for the Hear­ing Im­paired (TTAHI) and the Caribbean Cetacean So­ci­ety (CCS), re­flect UTT’s grow­ing role as a dri­ver of na­tion­al and re­gion­al de­vel­op­ment.

Through its col­lab­o­ra­tion with TTAHI, UTT will ex­pand ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion and sup­port ser­vices for learn­ers with hear­ing dis­abil­i­ties. The part­ner­ship will en­hance pro­fes­sion­al train­ing for ed­u­ca­tors, broad­en sign lan­guage in­ter­pre­ta­tion ser­vices, and ex­plore dig­i­tal and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence tech­nolo­gies to im­prove ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty in class­rooms. The ini­tia­tive is seen as a ma­jor step to­ward build­ing a more in­clu­sive ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tem, em­pow­er­ing per­sons with hear­ing im­pair­ments to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate in aca­d­e­m­ic and pro­fes­sion­al life.

UTT al­so for­malised its part­ner­ship with CCS to pi­o­neer ma­rine re­search across the Caribbean. Cen­tral to this col­lab­o­ra­tion is the CA­LYP­SO Project, the first in­te­grat­ed, basin-wide sci­en­tif­ic ex­pe­di­tion of its kind. The project aims to fill crit­i­cal knowl­edge gaps about ma­rine ecosys­tems, strength­en re­gion­al ocean gov­er­nance, and sup­port the cre­ation of new ma­rine pro­tect­ed ar­eas to safe­guard bio­di­ver­si­ty for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.