CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe today joins MIT Sloan Executive Education faculty and administrators and MIT-Haiti Initiative leaders for a planning session on the next phase of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, a joint partnership between MIT, Haitian educators, and the Haitian government. This initiative was designed to address issues of poverty alleviation, economic regeneration, the democratization and modernization of education in Haiti, and continued recovery efforts in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.
According to Prime Minister Lamothe, this collaborative project represents an effort to “empower Haitians to fly with their own wings.” The multi-phase program has been providing high-quality faculty training and curriculum development for teachers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (“STEM”). More recently, the Office of Executive Education at MIT’s Sloan School of Management has started offering management and leadership training to Haitian officials.
“At MIT, we recognize that meaningful growth and recovery in Haiti can be most effective from the inside, and we are working with Prime Minister Lamothe to equip leaders and educators with the tools that help turn innovative ideas into reality,” said Peter Hirst, MBE, executive director of Executive Education, at MIT Sloan. “The MIT-Haiti Initiative has already trained more than 100 teachers in STEM subjects and has presented Haitian government officials with world-class leadership education. This collaboration represents our ongoing commitment to effect real change through leadership and education on a global scale.”
In November 2013, three members of Lamothe’s cabinet participated in an intensive course offered by MIT Sloan Executive Education, “Transforming Your Leadership Strategy,” and they brought back to Haiti applicable leadership concepts to apply to issues facing their ministries, including rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The two-day course will be offered again Jun 17-18 and Nov 18-19, 2014 in Cambridge and is open to high-performing executives around the world.
As part of the next phase of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, later this month MIT professors Deborah Ancona and Michel DeGraff will travel to Haiti to conduct a workshop. They will deliver leadership training to more than 50 primary stakeholders in Haiti’s ongoing recovery efforts, including the Prime Minister, his cabinet ministers, State secretaries, and leaders of the government’s special projects for development.
“This initiative exemplifies MIT’s commitment to advancing knowledge and education, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. On the ground in Haiti and here in Cambridge, our goal is to make MIT’s resources available to many more of Haiti’s government and education leaders. We hope to share practical tools and frameworks relevant to many areas of education and management – from STEM, economics, and sustainability to leadership, innovation, and strategy,” said Hirst.
About the MIT-Haiti Initiative
Prompted by the destruction of Haitian universities by the 2010 earthquake, a group of MIT faculty responded to the opportunity to build Haitian universities for the future with the goal of making quality education available to greater numbers of Haitians in more diverse sectors of Haitian society. In 2013, MIT and the Government of Haiti signed an agreement to collaborate on the promotion of technology-enabled active learning in STEM with Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”) as an essential medium of instruction. This agreement is part of a nation-wide effort to increase access to quality education by helping Haitians learn in the language that most of them speak at home.
The MIT-Haiti Initiative was founded to provide high-quality digital technologies and open educational resources in Kreyòl to faculty and students in Haiti. The initiative was broadened to include Haitian government leaders in order to develop and implement innovative leadership strategies in the government’s campaign against poverty in Haiti. In 2013, MIT Professor Chris Kaiser, then Provost, said that the initiative represents MIT’s “desire to do good in the world.”
About MIT Sloan Executive Education
MIT Sloan Executive Education programs are designed for senior executives and high-potential managers from around the world. From intensive two-day courses focused on a particular area of interest, to executive certificates covering a range of management topics, to custom engagements addressing the specific business challenges of a particular organization, our portfolio of non-degree, executive education and management programs provides business professionals with a targeted and flexible means to advance their career development goals and position their organizations for future growth. Those interested in taking part in Transforming Your Leadership Strategy, Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler, Communication and Persuasion in the Digital Age, or any of the other open enrollment courses taught by MIT faculty, are invited to register at http://executive.mit.edu.
