The University of the West Indies

The University of the West indies (UWI), originally University College of the West Indies, is a public university system established to offer education to the residents of the 18 English-speaking Commonwealth countries and territories of the Caribbean.

Since its inception in 1943, the university has expanded to include three main campuses: Mona campus in Jamaica, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, and Cave Hill in Barbados. Each campus houses the schools of humanities and education, law, medical sciences, sciences and technology and social sciences. The St. Augustine campus houses engineering and food and agriculture.

The university has a fourth online-based virtual campus called the Open Campus, which is an amalgamation of several previous organisations for distance education. It has a physical presence and heads of sites in each of the 18 Commonwealth countries. Over the four campuses, the university has around 36,000 students.

Its motto translates from Latin to "A light rising from the west", and the university mascot is a pelican.

There are also international programmes and partnerships with more than a dozen universities in the USA, Canada, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Mexico, including the University of Toronto, the University of Massachusetts, Yale University and King’s College London.

UWI alumni include president of Guyana David A. Granger, judge of the International Court of Justice Patrick Lipton Robinson, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature Derek Walcott, as well as 72 Rhodes Scholars, three Gates Cambridge Scholarship winners, and 18 current or former Caribbean heads of government.