OECS Director General Calls for Rebuilding Human Civilization with Education at OPEC Fund Development Forum

Advocating for reform in how development experts approach sustainability, the Director General of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), Dr. Didacus Jules, participated as a panelist in this year’s OPEC Fund Development Forum on June 25, 2024, in Vienna, Austria. 

Following a day of solution-oriented discussions and networking sessions with a focus on people, Dr. Jules commended the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Fund for International Development’s (OPEC Fund's) tangible commitments to create a more equitable world.

Dr. Jules presented on the forum’s closing panel titled “Walking the Last Mile for Small Island Developing States (SIDS)” where he compared SIDS to

“an ideal petri dish on a small scale to show innovation in a holistic, integrated way that can actually be scaled up in larger demographics”. 

His fellow panelists were Al Shaimaa Al-Sheiby - Vice President, Strategy, OPEC Fund; Chad Blackman - Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment, Barbados; ​ and Mere Falemaka - Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva, Pacific Islands Forum.

“We’re still caught in that paradigm of seeing education as serving the needs of the economy…It’s not just about the skills fit for the economy and the new direction but also we need to look at education from three perspectives,” Dr. Jules said. 

He expanded on the three perspectives of purpose for rebuilding human civilization, pedagogy, and assessment.

Dr. Jules said, “We need to learn to learn but also to learn to do.”

Vice President Al Shaimaa Al-Sheiby announced the OPEC Fund Island Resilience Facility which is an initiative among the OPEC Fund Development Partnes of about $500 million for a needs-based financing approach to benefit SIDS.

Watch the full panel discussion: