Education
Education As Development
The National University of Samoa is Forging New Ties Around the Region
“It’s a gem,” Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, said one night over dinner in Honolulu. She was talking about the National University of Samoa, and her fondness for the institution is justified by her long association with its history. As current Samoa government minister of education, she also presides as pro-chancellor of NUS.
She was in Hawaii recently, with NUS Vice Chancellor Magele Mauiliu, to sign an historic memorandum of understanding between NUS and the University of Hawaii. UH Chancellor Joyce Tsunoda, who is also a vice president for international realtions, represented UH at the signing ceremony that took place in Honolulu on August 30.
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The new agreement means that NUS will be able to work closely with the Pacific Business Center Program at UH’s College of Business Administration to provide entrepreneurial and business development services to the people of the South Pacific. The University of Guam will do likewise for people in the Northwestern Pacific.
“The MOU,” says Minister Fiame, “is about business. It’s an instrument that let’s our university work on development projects along with expertise and exchanges of students and faculty from UH.”
Yet the MOU is only one part of the network of relationships that the NUS has been forging for itself. Born in 1984, amid some local and regional controversy, the university was built in Malifa, just outside Apia, with infrastructure money from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. NUS has relationships with the University of Canterbury at Christchurch, Aotearoa and also operates a 3-year, $7 million teacher training project funded by the Asian Development Bank.
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Fiame says that before the founding of NUS, “there were so few opportunities for our young people to get access to higher education. There were a few scholarships available for overseas and, of course, the elite could send their children off, but otherwise there was nowhere to go.”
Fiame says that the devastation wrought on the country’s educational infrastructure by Cyclones Ofa and Val in 1990 and 1991 actually presented the government with a unique opportunity to re-think its education system from the ground up. “In a way it was very exciting for me as minister,” Fiame says. “We did the whole policy thing and developed a 15-year plan in 1995.”
Critics in the 1980s predicted that the campus would just deteriorate after the initial infusion of Japanese money, but that has not happened. The 1,500-student university is thriving and gaining more respect for itself around the region as it forges alliances like the one with UH, alliances that insure that the software of Samoan development, which is a well-educated work force, continues to be produced by this gem of a university.
