What is the vision and mission of your organisation?
The Department of Infrastructure is a nationally and internationally recognized scientific institute for education, research and consultancy services. It is aimed at enabling graduates to carry out their profession effectively in the field of developing and creating infrastructural facilities in Suriname.
The goals of the organisation is to educate qualified expertise in infrastructure to be able to support the infrastructure development in Suriname, to create an expert that can function in an objective way, based on expertise, creativity, teamwork and ethics. Another goal is to function successfully on technical and management level at Infra-consultancies, production companies, government and NGO’s, and to conduct research at research institutes and labs. We also hope to provide a scientific program which enable graduates to pursue post graduate and academic programs.
Why did you decide to become a GWP Partner?
Because of our education and research role in water related topics. Suriname has only one university, so we need to put all efforts to offer high quality water education and research. Within a regional network, it is expected that we can easily try to reach this goal. Further more, slowly more companies are asking the University to conduct water related research and not all knowledge is available at our institution.
What have you found to be the benefits of being a GWP Partner?
From the GWP network, it may be easy to get experts for specific problems like the capacity building process in Suriname or review of research. Also it may be easy to request funding to solve specific small scale water related needs, e.g. training programmes and research. However, I am not satisfied with results of the above, which has probably to do with a good working network, funding, balance between the island states and the Guiana’s region.
What is one challenge facing the management of water resources in your region?
One challenge [is to get] policy makers to invest in water resources management, ranging from observations networks to the development of policies.
A new website is under construction but you can read more about the department of infrastructure here.