The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

UNIVERSITY of The Bahamas is still not up to date with audited financial statements as required by law, something UB’s chair Allyson Maynard-Gibson suggested has been an impediment to the institution’s fundraising capacity.

After announcing Dr Erik Rolland as the next president of UB, Mrs Maynard-Gibson said the institution has been having financial challenges.

“We want at the end of our tenure to have the university in a very strong financial position and leaning in on the support of wide stakeholders in our community, industrial stakeholders and others, persons who live within our boundaries and love the cause of education, recognise how important the cause of education is. We hope that we can, through our courses, effective utilisation of the assets of the university and so forth, turn some of these into revenue generating and productive assets that we have,” she said.

When the University of The Bahamas Act was passed in 2016, officials said it was critical for opening fundraising paths for the institution. The law established the college as a university and allowed for greater autonomy in its management. To date, however, the university’s fundraising capacity remains limited.

Asked about fundraising as a university, Mrs Maynard-Gibson said: “The experiences to date have had some successes for which I would like to thank (outgoing UB president Dr Rodney Smith) and his team. Very early in my (tenure) you would have seen that I was right here in this spot as we received a grant from FTX in regards to sustainability. There have been at the northern campus an event where the IDB gave a grant for technology, incubators, innovation, etc.

“So the advancement team has been able to actually garner some support but even by their own admission it has not been as effective as they would have liked. One of the challenges is that we don’t at the moment have audited financial statements that are current. I will say that this board has been assiduous in its focus on obtaining audited financial statements. We expect by the end of the year to be up-to-date and we believe that once we have audited financial statements and we consider all that this university has to offer, that it will be almost like turbocharging the efforts to raise funds.”

In 2015, The Tribune revealed that poor, out-of-date audit practices at the college prevented the institution from accessing funds from a $16.1m Caribbean Development Bank loan that was intended to upgrade the institution as it transitioned to a university. The loan was eventually abandoned. At the time, the college was at least four years behind in audits and it had been seven years since an audit for the institution had been last tabled in the House of Assembly. It is not clear how many years of audited financial statements remain outstanding.