Research and Higher Education Policies for the Transformation of Societies: Perspectives from the Anglophone Caribbean is the keynote address at the UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge held in Trinidad and Tobago in July 2007. It essentially does the following:

1. Contrasts the development of Higher Education in the Spanish Caribbean and North America with the Anglophone Caribbean highlighting the 300-year difference in its commencement in the latter. Notes the meagre provision for higher education by the British over the period 1830 and 1948 and locates the impetus for the modern development and diversification of higher education in the Anglophone Caribbean to adult suffrage and representative government beginning in 1948.
2. Outlines three periods in the modern era: the founding of the single regional university, the University College of the West Indies, in 1948; the establishment of national universities starting with the University of Guyana in 1963; and private for profit universities starting with the St Georges University Medical School in Grenada in 1976.
3. Traces the origin of the development of research capacity and knowledge generation in the Anglophone Caribbean to the creation of the St Vincent Botanical Gardens in 1765 and the Bath Botanical Gardens in Jamaica in 1779 and followed by the Imperial College of Agriculture in Trinidad and the Farm School in Jamaica in the first two decades of the 20^th century.
4. Adopts the imperatives driving Caribbean transformation presented by Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur in his address to the Conference on the Caribbean in the 21 Century Conference in June 2007 held in Washington DC.
5. Discusses issues related to policies for the further development of research and higher education in the Anglophone Caribbean with respect to process and timeframe; demographic factors; regional cooperation; Caribbean integration; and the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME);
6. These discussions include references to the findings and recommendation from the First Septennial Review of the University of Technology and notions such as the Anglophone Caribbean being both place and people; not being either North American or Latin American; and that current geopolitics is forcing the twelve independent Anglophone countries, Haiti and Surinam into a common space and imposing on them a shared destiny.