He discovered his voice and love for advocacy as a student leader championing the rights of his colleagues when he addressed the forum at the “United Nations House” for a series of “Activate Talks” on issues faced by students in Barbados and the wider Caribbean. He is also a member of “UN Activate Talks”. Shakeem holds a certificate in Project Management from The University of the West Indies Open Campus and a Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) Diploma from the Ellerslie School. He is currently pursuing an LLB Degree at The University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus.
]]>Ashley was crowned Miss Teen Barbados in 2016 and Miss World Barbados in 2018. She represented Barbados at the Miss World pageant in December 2018. She founded the “Ashley Lashley Foundation” to focus on creating a greater sense of awareness of some of the world’s major social, environmental and health issues, particularly in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). She also created the “Healthy and Environmentally-Friendly Youth” (HEY) campaign to focus on Climate Change and health.
Her motto is “Let no obstacle be greater than the cause”.
]]>A Life Dedicated to Service
Introduction
Today we have the pleasure of honouring one of the most distinguished daughters of the Caribbean, Dame Billie Miller of Barbados, who has lived a life of dedicated service to the people of the Caribbean, and who has been a trailblazer in the fight for the rights of women all over the world.
Early life and education
Billie, as she is affectionately and universally known, was born on January 8th 1944 into an eminent Barbadian family. Her father, Fredrick ‘Freddie’ Miller, was repeatedly elected, as a member of the Barbados Labour Party, to the Parliament of Barbados from 1948 to 1966, and served as Minister of Health during his tenure. Billie grew up in her family home in Brighton, St. Michael
She was educated at Belair Junior School and Queen’s College, Barbados, and went on to study law at King’s College, then in Newcastle, and the Council of Legal Education in England.
Public Service
A few of her illustrious achievements:
Her list of honours and awards, both national and international, is also a lengthy one.
Conclusion
Dame Billie has been passionate about many things all her life: her beloved Bridgetown, serving the people of Barbados, promoting a robust role for NGOs in making lives better, advancing the cause of regional integration and unity, and fighting for the rights of small island states in the international arena.
She has been not only outspoken and unrelenting in her advocacy, but has also taken the time to encourage and mentor many young women, including the present Prime Minister of Barbados, the Hon. Mia Mottley, Q.C., M.P. In this case, her mentorship has obviously borne precious fruit.
It is with great pleasure the Caribbean Community confers on Dame Billie Miller its highest award – The Order of the Caribbean Community. Let us all join in expressing our congratulations to Dame Billie.
Thank you.
]]>The early years of CARIFESTA were captured from the Newspaper clippings collection sourced from The National Library of Guyana. The CARIFESTA collection currently covers information emanating from all the CARIFESTAs held to date. The Collection is supplemented by contributions from the Directorate of Human and Social Development through its Culture desk which liaises with the various Directors of Culture in the region and with the Secretariats of the Host Country.
The Collection includes consultants’ and country reports, articles extracted from magazines, correspondence, press releases, information leaflets, presentations at Symposia, programmes, various CARIFESTA themes; posters, photographs and newspaper clippings.
]]>These goals serve as a guideline for developing appropriate programme interventions and resource allocations, both at the regional and national level. Goals and targets should be reviewed from time to time to ensure they adequately and effectively respond to the needs and challenges of target populations. Importantly, while achieving the goals and targets of the CYAP, CYAs can help young people achieve their goals through matching the programmes implemented and the policies with their needs.
The CSME Unit of the CARICOM Secretariat is the impementation office which assists the Member States in fulfilling the requirements of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.
The Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) served as the governing body to remove tariffs and other barriers to intra-regional trade in Goods. In 1973, the CARIFTA agreement was deepened through the signing of The Treaty of Chaguaramas in Guyana. The Treaty included provisions to create a Common Market within the Caribbean region.
Following from this treaty, in 1989 at Grande Anse, Grenada, the CARICOM Heads of Government transformed the Common Market into the Single Market and Single Economy formally named the Caribbean Single Market and Economy- CSME. By 2002, the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was revised and updated to the removal of existing barriers of trade and to establish a Single Market space which included services, capital, technology, and the free movement of skilled professionals.
The CSME seeks to implement provisions for the removal of trade and professional restrictions. These provisions facilitate the right to establishment businesses, to provide regional services, the free movement of capital and the coordination of economic policies. In the ensuing years, some Caribbean economies, under the auspices of multilateral lending institutions, implemented structural adjustment programmes having at their core, programmes of economic, financial and trade liberalisation that far exceeded their commitments as expressed in the Treaty of Chaguaramas. The fundamental aspects of CSME are as following:
Dame Nita Barrow’s calling to service in the health care field commenced with a career in nursing, one of the few options open to young women in her time. From nursing to health care administration she progressed to a remarkable and illustrious career in Public Health and Heath Education which transported her into the spotlight of the international arena. Her appointment in 1964 as Nursing Adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and subsequently to the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) availed her the wonderful opportunity to serve the Region she loved as principal adviser to sixteen Caribbean governments and sparked off a long productive career in the UN System. Dame Barrow was recognized internationally as an authority on Public Health and Health Education, producing several publications on issues pertaining to health care. The scholastic career of this eminent daughter of the Caribbean included graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and the University of Edinborough.
A strong Christian and daughter of an Anglican Priest, Dame Barrow lived a spiritually anchored life, pursuing the provision of adequate health care out of her deep concern for the welfare of humanity. She was appointed Director of the Christian Medical Commission on the World Council of Churches in 1975. Dame Barrow is acclaimed for her active involvement in and strong advocacy for women’s rights, particularly the right to adequate health care. Through service within the United Nations and other engagements of her international career she consistently represented the condition of women and disadvantaged groups with the hope of alleviating manifestations of poverty in their daily lives. Participation in activities to mark the UN Decade for Women and her appointment as Director of the Global Forum for Women generated further opportunities for Dame Barrow to advocate and provide leadership in the interest of women.
Dame Nita Barrow earned a stellar reputation in her career in the diplomatic community. From 1986 – 1990 she functioned as Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Barbados to the UN, a prelude to her appointment as Governor-General of Barbados from 1990 –1995. Dame Barrow’s life of dedicated service accorded her the honour of representation on numerous international bodies including several UN Groupings on the Environment and as a Member of the Earth Council. In recognition of her life of exemplary leadership and service to the region’s women and its peoples in general Dame Barrow has the distinction of being the first Caribbean woman to be accorded membership of the Order of the Caribbean Community in 1994. Other awards deservedly granted in the service of others include the Caribbean Prize for Peace Through Struggle For Justice in 1986. She was honoured as Dame of St. Andrew and Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George.
]]>George Lamming, poet, novelist, essay writer, orator, lecturer, teacher, editor and tireless activist for a new world-order and a New-World order, seems to have entered the world of Caribbean letters as an elder statesman. Born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, Lamming attended Roebuck’s Boys’ School from which he won a scholarship to Combermere High School. There, fostered by his teacher Frank Collymore, publisher of the literary journal BIM, who permitted Lamming to use his private library, Lamming developed a passion for reading and began his literary career as a poet.
Recommended by Collymore, Lamming at the age of nineteen gained a teaching position at El Collegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port-of-Spain Trinidad, where between 1946 and 1950, Lamming taught English to young Hispanic students before migrating to England in 1950. Lamming encountered England as an already mature and profoundly organic intellectual, whose most vivid childhood memory was of the March 1937 Labour Riots in Barbados, and whose Trinidad experience had exposed him to that country’s poets – Cecil Herbert and Eric Roach – and young nationalistic intellectuals, in those early days of Universal Adult Suffrage, wildcat politics, emergent trade unionism and agitation for social and political reform.
The depths of Lamming’s understanding of social, political and historical issues are soon revealed in his first four novels: In the Castle of My Skin, (1953), The Emigrants, (1954) Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure, (1960). In the Castle of My Skin presents the plantation as economic, social and psychic structure, locating the Barbadian village in its erased history of feudal serfdom, and recognizing the ambiguity of colonial education as an agency of both social emancipation and mental re-enslavement. Lamming’s novels and essays for three decades afterwards would mercilessly scrutinize the new class of intellectual proprietors and overseers produced by that education.
As the idea of a West Indian Federation took shape in the mid-1950’s, Lamming in 1955 dreamed up the concept of the “New World of the Caribbean”, and who together with Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Arthur Seymour and other writers, celebrated this concept of a new world in four epic radio programmes of readings, in which Caribbean journeys of discovery, migration, arrival, return and reconstruction are recognized as part of the same process of becoming. He then infused his next two novels with this spirit of regionalism, by creating in his imaginary nation of San Cristobal, a composite Caribbean state. In Season of Adventure, San Cristobal combines the cultural features of Trinidad, Haiti and Jamaica, while in Of Age and Innocence, San Cristobal is patterned on the histories and racially tinctured politics of Guyana and Trinidad, with their large African and Asian-ancestored populations. By means of these two novels Lamming holds out to the Caribbean alternative possibilities of redemption and catastrophe, cultural fusion and ethnic fission.
Lamming divined that true political liberation in fragmented multiethnic colonies needed to be based on open dialogue, shared experience and communion both between and within ethnic groups; a communion itself that required trust, absolute candour and honesty between the leadership and populace on the one hand, and between the contesting communities in an ethnically diverse society. Being both realist and dreamer, Lamming recognized that these qualities of openness, trust and candour had never been permitted existence in a colonial situation, and showed how secrecy and mistrust could generate social and political catastrophe. Lamming has since then remained a resolute, eloquent and probably sad prophet against racism in Caribbean politics; a warner, even in the face of past disasters and present disintegration.
Lamming has always written and spoken with a sense of mission. Speaking in 1970 on “The Social Role of Writers” he declared that:
“The writer or artist is, in fact, a citizen and a worker; and his social role should be contained in the process of that work. The novelist or poet in such a society would be performing a social role of the greatest importance by writing the novels and poems which he feels he has to write and which bear witness to the experiences of that society at any or all of its levels. A social function has truly been fulfilled if such work helps to create an awareness of society which did not exist before; or to inform and enrich an awareness which was not yet deeply felt.”
Speaking of his own sense of mission, Lamming defines himself in the same terms that he once used to define CLR James, as “a kind of evangelist. I’m a preacher of some kind. I am a man bringing a message…. I don’t know what you would make of it.” The novel, the essay, the interview, the conversation, the lecture, the great oration — these are simply the different structures through which Lamming brings his messages, be they affirmations or admonitions.
He has delivered his messages all over the world: in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, at the Universities of Texas at Austin, Pennsylvania, Miami where he has taught creative writing or attended conferences; in Australia, Denmark, Tanzania, the U.K., Canada, where he has been on lecture tours; in Cuba, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti. He has travelled to all parts of the globe, this youthful veteran of eighty-one years, voicing his messages with the same sense of mission he saw in CLR James; displaying “this intellectual energy… this enthusiasm… this extraordinary optimism about what you have here and what could be made of it.”
In conferring on George William Lamming the Order of the Caribbean Community, CARICOM is honouring fifty-five years of extraordinary engagement with the responsibility of illuminating Caribbean identities, healing the wounds of erasure and fragmentation, envisioning possibilities, transcending inherited limitations. In recognizing this son and ancestor, CARICOM is applauding intellectual energy, constancy of vision, and an unswerving dedication to the ideals of freedom and sovereignty.
]]>Professor Violet Eudine Barriteau, is both an exemplary authority figure in her role as Deputy Principal and Professor of Gender and Public Policy of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus and a most outstanding role model for women throughout the Caribbean. Her rich contribution to the advancement of women’s empowerment and gender equality, through her advocacy, teaching, research and publications in the field of Gender and Development has long been recognized by the Region and international communities. To Violet Eudine Barriteau, much respect is due.
Respect is due for Professor Barriteau’s rich academic background: she began her training in teacher education at the UWI School of Education in Cave Hill and later qualified at the Bachelor’s level at UWI Cave Hill in Public Administration and Accounting. Graduate work took her to the United States of America where she gained her Master’s degree in Public Administration, specializing in Public Sector Financial Management from New York University in 1984. She was awarded the PhD in Political Science with a specialization in Political Economy and Political Theory in 1994 from Howard University in Washington.
Respect is due for the quality of Professor Barriteau’s prolific research and extensive publication record. She received the University of the West Indies Press Inaugural Award for the bestselling text book published by the UWI Press for the year 2004, Confronting Power, Theorising Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean. She was also awarded the Commonwealth Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Gender and Health. Her role in strengthening research and teaching and building knowledge on Gender and Development, and Caribbean women as catalysts for change has been exemplary. Special recognition and respect is warranted in acknowledging Professor Barriteau’s development of an original model for theorizing and analyzing Caribbean gender systems, which has been adopted and adapted by the CARICOM Secretariat to inform its framework for mainstreaming gender in key CARICOM programmes on Gender in Development. She has also provided policy advice to the Government of Barbados on central matters related to Gender in Development.
Respect is due for her leadership of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, Cave Hill (now the Institute for Gender and Development Studies). There, she initiated and managed an interdisciplinary research project Caribbean Women Catalysts for Change which led to the publication of the seminal work on Dame Nita Barrow, Stronger, Surer, Bolder; Ruth NitaBarrow, Social Change and International Development. The project also researched the public life of Dame Eugenia Charles and Professor Barriteau coedited the book Enjoying Power: Eugenia Charles and Political Leadership in the Commonwealth Caribbean. A successful output of the project was the Nita Barrow Women and Development Specialist Collection which was made accessible to researchers in February 2005 and formally launched on November 15th 2006. Under her leadership also, The Centre for Gender and Development Studies acquired the primary papers, diaries and documents of these two outstanding women leaders in the Commonwealth; Dame Nita Barrow, Governor General of Barbados (1990-1995) and Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica, the first female Prime Minister in the Caribbean (1980-1995).
Respect is due for her contribution to the objectives of women’s empowerment and gender equality in the non-governmental arena. This contribution has combined with, yet also transcended, the academic realm to have a powerful impact nationally and internationally. Professor Barriteau served as Regional Coordinator of the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a South-South network spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America the Caribbean and Arab world, which contributed significantly to the United Nations Conferences on Women, Development and Peace. She held this position during the period 1996-1999 during which time, the Caribbean Region and Caribbean women led by DAWN played a pivotal role in supporting, monitoring and holding the Regional community accountable for the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. She also served as the Chair of the International Association of Feminist Economics from 2009-2010.
Respect is due for the passion for justice, equality, women’s empowerment and the advancement of knowledge and research which she has brought to the chairmanship of a range of committees in her role as Deputy Principal. She presently chairs the Staff Development and Campus Lecture Series committees, Student Services Advisory committee, the Campus Committee on Sexual Harassment and the Campus Committee for the Vice Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence among others. She combines these activities with her role as Coordinator of the MPhil/PhD programme, and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI.
It is no wonder, given the many facets of Professor Barriteau’s outstanding scholarship and impressive career, the respect due to her has been demonstrated in the conferral of several awards and honours. She was named International Fellow of the Centre of Excellence in Research on Gender GEXCEL Orebro University in Sweden in 2008 and 2010; a Senior Fulbright fellow, Howard University Washington; the Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Women in Development and Community Transformation Inaugural Fellow, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; an American Association of University Women Scholar; and a Barbadian Woman of Excellence, National Organization of Women, Women in Excellence Photographic Exhibition. She was also recognized and awarded as an Exemplar for the Principle of Nia purpose by the Commission of Pan African Affairs.
The role that Violet Eudine Barriteau has consistently and passionately pursued in promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women has raised the profile of gender and development in academia and the Region and has contributed in no small way to the achievement of Caribbean national and international goals including those signed under the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals.
This eminent Caribbean citizen whom we honour today, was born in Grenada and is a citizen of Barbados where she grew up. She is worthy of our respect as she has broken the glass ceiling against tremendous odds, both as a migrant and a woman. She has maintained her vision, her passion and her friendships; not only with her academic and professional colleagues, but also with persons from the early days of the challenges which came with settling in a new country as a young girl. Her justifiable pride in her accomplishments is shared by her son, Cabral who is here with us today.
For her outstanding contribution to the field of Gender and Development and her role as a powerful exemplar of self-respect, self-discipline, vision and leadership, it is with pleasure that the Caribbean Community now invites Professor Violet Eudine Barriteau to accept the Tenth CARICOM Triennial Award for Women.
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