Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe joined 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 on June 5, 2014. The MIT-Haiti Initiative is a joint partnership between MIT, Haitian educators and the Haitian government. The program was created to address issues of poverty alleviation, economic regeneration and the democratization and modernization of education in Haiti. The initiative is also a continued recovery effort from the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti.
The program has been providing high-quality faculty training and curriculum development for teachers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The Office of Executive Education at MIT’s Sloan School of Management has begun to offer 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 Executive Director of Executive Education at MIT Sloan, Peter Hirst. “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.”
For the next phase of the program, two MIT professors will travel to Haiti to conduct a workshop later this month. They will deliver leadership training to more than 50 primary stakeholders in Haiti’s ongoing recovery efforts.
“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.