President donates $2.5M to QC on its 175th anniversary

Queen’s College, the most sought after Secondary School in Guyana, is celebrating its 175th anniversary.

President David Granger, a former student of Queen’s College, on Tuesday morning attended the school’s General Assembly where he donated $2.5M to its Science and Technology efforts.

The President was the featured speaker at the event where he noted that Science and Technology is most important to ensure that Guyana can compete in the developing world.

“Studies suggest that the rate of automation will continue to increase by 2030 [such as the Mc Kinsey Global Institute’s December 2017 study on job transitions in the workplace]. These studies point to an increasing need for engineers, information technology specialists and other scientists to drive economic growth,” the Head-of-State said.

As Guyana’s Petroleum industry continues to expand, President Granger said Science and Technology education is essential to mastering the skills needed for establishing knowledge-based industries and for modernization.

“Guyana still needs and will continue to need new skills to populate occupations in the ‘green’ environment, in the petroleum sector and in digital economic sectors in the evolving state.”

The donation was welcomed by the school’s principal Jackie Ralph, who in her address said “since its establishment on the 5^th of August 1844, this educational institution has been unparalleled to any other educational edifice in the Caribbean and the Diaspora.”

The President has been making donations to several schools across the country under the National Endowment for Science and Technology (NEST) which provides much needed support to schools in the area of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

The Government has been supporting STEM Guyana which allows teens to create technology solutions to solve problems in their communities. The agency also prepares students to compete at the international level in robotics.

In fact, STEMGuyana sent a team last weekend to participate in the First Global robotics competition in Dubai where they won the Albert Einstein gold medal for excellence.

Deemed the most prestigious award in the competition, it is awarded to teams whose robots performed the best during the First Global Challenge.