Commonwealth of Learning
Launch of the Lifelong Learning for Farmers Project
Kaluthavalai, Batticaloa, Eastern Province, Sri Lanka
Learning, Farming, Prospering
Remarks by Sir John Daniel
Professor Pathmanathan, Professor Coomaraswamy, Professor Wijesekera, Dr Seran.
It is a pleasure to be here and a privilege to visit the village of Kaluthavalai along with colleagues involved in the L3Farmers programme from India, Kenya, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea and Uganda, as well as a group from Hambantota. I have very good memories of launching L3 Farmers in Hambantota last year and I am delighted that you have made the long journey to show solidarity with the farmers here.
I congratulate you and I congratulate the farmer of Kaluthavalai. From our visit to your farms yesterday I can tell that you are good at what you do and good at innovating to do it better. You grow excellent produce under difficult conditions of soil and climate. Last night, on the way back in the bus, our African colleagues remarked that compared to you they are very lucky, having good soil and abundant rainfall.
I am delighted that you have joined the L3 Farmers programme in order better to understand the wider context in which your farming is carried out and to link, through information and communications technology, to the resources of knowledge that can help you do better. It was most impressive to see you operating the computing equipment to produce lessons on the diseases that affect your crops.
May I also pay tribute to our colleagues at the Eastern University? Along with the other universities that are fostering the L3 Farmers programme in other parts of Sri Lanka you are pioneering a new sort of relationship between universities and their immediate communities. This is a relationship that holds enormous promise.
Before coming here I was at a UNESCO conference in Macau on future challenges for higher education in the Asia Pacific region. Universities usually claim that their three functions are teaching, research and service. However, the general consensus at the conference was that with few exceptions the commitment to service is rhetorical rather than real. That is clearly not the case here and I hope that when the World Conference on Higher Education convenes in Paris next year Sri Lanka will profile the excellent work that your universities are doing to engage with their communities through L3 Farmers.
Last year, when I was here to launch the project in Hambantota, I had the honour of meeting President Rajapaksa who immediately saw the connection between L3 Farmers and his national development programme Gama Neguma. We undertook to create synergy between L3Farmers and that programme and he promised the support of all the relevant ministries. I shall be meeting the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of National Development and Gama Neguma when I return to Colombo.
You are committed as farmers to using L3Farmers to make your village more prosperous. The country is also committed to the approach. I want to assure you today that the Commonwealth of Learning is also committed and will accompany you on your journey for as long as it takes. Dr. Krishna Alluri has done a wonderful job of conceiving and implementing the L3 Farmers programme during his time at COL and I thank you warmly for the touching tribute that you paid to him just now. Krishna retires at the end of the year and it gives me pleasure to announce publicly for the first time that he will be succeeded by Dr. Balasubramanian, who will join COL on a full-time basis in January. I think that gives you the guarantee of the continuity of COL's commitment.
May I also thank you for the presentation that you made to me? As soon as I arrived at COL four years ago I realised that L3 Farmers was a winning concept and it has been a pleasure to support, as President, the great work of Dr. Alluri and his extraordinary L3F network.
May I in turn pay tribute to the outstanding work of our national L3 Farmers coordinator here, Professor Uma Coomaraswamy? I am delighted to say that we recognised her splendid contribution, not only to this project but to the development of distance learning in Sri Lanka generally, by making her an Honorary Fellow of COL at our Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning that was held in London in July. She is a wonderful person who has the gift of transforming the organisations that she leads and is inspired by a deep commitment to unity and harmony in this beautiful country of yours.
With those few words I shall now, very appropriately, use a computer to officially launch the Lifelong Learning for Farmers project in the Eastern Province.
Thank you and my best wishes to you all.