The Tribune

By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Association of Land Surveyors (BALS) is renewing its call for greater investment in local training and education programmes, arguing that The Bahamas can develop enough professionals to meet demand and reduce reliance on foreign surveyors.

BALS president Rodrick Wood said the association’s concerns about the continued employment of expatriate surveyors by the Government have not diminished since the issue was first raised earlier this year.

“That’s something that we work on continuously,” Mr Wood said. “Our concern about that topic has not gone away. The government is still employing surveyors from outside the country.”

The comments come months after BALS publicly challenged the Government’s decision to recruit foreign surveyors to help tackle a backlog of Crown Land applications. At the time, the association argued that qualified Bahamian surveyors were available to perform the work and questioned whether some expatriate surveyors were undertaking private projects outside the scope of their work permits.

While Mr Wood acknowledged there may be circumstances where foreign expertise is beneficial, he said such arrangements should contribute to developing locals.

“Having some persons come from overseas from time to time, it’s not so bad, particularly if they’re going to be in a training capacity,” he said. “To my knowledge, these persons who are here now, they are not involved in any training or development capacity.”

BALS believes the long-term solution lies in building a sustainable pipeline of Bahamian surveyors through local and regional educational institutions.

“Our point is we want to do our part to reduce and alleviate this need for constantly bringing in foreign persons in the surveying profession,” Mr Wood said.

He argued that The Bahamas has successfully developed local expertise in other professional fields and should adopt a similar strategy for surveying.

“We train lawyers in this country, we train doctors, we train nurses,” Mr Wood said. “We have a nursing college here. We have a law school in The Bahamas. We have the University of The Bahamas that has civil engineering and mathematics and physics, and we have people at the doctorate level in mathematics at the University of The Bahamas who are eagerly awaiting for us to send them 10 people a year, so we can give them the mathematical background and get them in surveying.”

The association is also urging the Government to redirect some of its educational investment toward expanding domestic training opportunities.

Mr Wood noted that The Bahamas contributes financially to regional universities, including the University of the West Indies, but argued that additional resources should be directed toward strengthening programmes at local institutions such as the University of The Bahamas and the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute (BTVI).

“We know that The Bahamas government, say the University of the West Indies, there’s a standing arrangement to support that institution,” he said. “We’re not knocking that. We don’t have a problem with that.

“My point is, we would like to see some money spent, since we have our own university and our BTVI,” he said. “We would like to see some money spent on developing these local institutions and assisting them to meet the demand for surveyors.”

He added that if the Government continues to support overseas programmes, it should ensure Bahamians are filling available places.

“We need to make sure we get five to 10 people in those seats if we’re going to be contributing a million dollars or whatever the amount of money is to those institutions,” Mr Wood said. “We need to fill those seats with Bahamians and bring those trained, educated Bahamians back to The Bahamas.”

According to Mr Wood, BALS has already begun working with BTVI to develop surveying-related training opportunities.

“We also want to mention that we do intend, or we already started the programme at BTVI, and we definitely want to improve on that programme as well,” he said.

The organisation also recently celebrated its reinstatement to the International Federation of Surveyors after previously losing its membership, a development members described as restoring credibility to the profession internationally.

Meanwhile, questions remain about the role foreign surveyors may be playing in the Government’s planned digital land register initiative. Asked whether expatriate professionals are assisting with the establishment of the new land registry system, Mr Wood said he was unable to provide a definitive answer.

“Honestly, I can’t answer that question right now,” he said.

For BALS, however, the central issue remains ensuring that future demand for surveying services is increasingly met by Bahamians.

“I would have pressed hard to develop our own system of recruiting people first, send them to whatever universities or training programmes there are around the world, bring them back and eventually set up our own local training,” Mr Wood said. “So that we can fill the need.”