 The National Integrated Planning and Program Unit, NIPP, within the Department of Finance, recently held a two-week building condition assessment and asset management training the trainer's course at the South Lewis Community College. Director of the NIP, Howard Wells, noted that training modules comprised best practices for maintaining public buildings through the conduct of building condition assessments, planning and prioritizing maintenance, and deriving replacement costs for financial decision-making. Throughout the years, the government of St. Lucia, this has been a continuous problem. Buildings and the conditions, eventually it moves on to sick buildings. So we're taking the scientific approach to this. We want to develop a series of baseline, a strategy, where we could attack this at least to create a baseline, get the data that can inform, one, our policymakers very importantly, but of course our finance technocrats. So when they get submissions from all the agencies who are responsible for taking care of government buildings, they in turn understand the decision-making process, and of course the figures that come before them. The training course was facilitated by Dr. Louise Bermudez, who is a consultant structural and wind engineer and a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. I think the main purpose of these two weeks is to create the training trainers and the participants are eager to learn and use this in the future, especially the faculty members here at the college. They will be able to use this as a starting point and improve as needed for the need of the St. Lucia people. Lecturer in the Engineering and Circular Economy Unit at the South for Lewis Community College, Kareen Snack-Hippelet, is optimistic that this management course will rebound positively to the future built infrastructure on the island. So students will be a lot more aware of their actions going out there, getting out into the field. So in terms of preventative maintenance, in terms of being able to assess a building better and to understand all of the difficulties we have with our buildings, our current buildings right now, it will assist them in that way and please them in a much better place to do better. The Bills Consulting was tasked with developing a tool to assist the NIP unit in relation to asset management. In developing the tool, a physical assessment was conducted of 25 buildings and a report was generated outlining the conditions of these buildings, the required repairs or renovations and the high-level costs to remedy the building's condition. Charlene Menal is a civil engineer with The Bills Consulting. I think the NIP department is doing a very good job in terms of looking at this from a long term. Government has a lot of facilities. I think the list right now they said is about 500, but we only started with 25 just to get them ball rolling and I think the intention would be for various technocrats, those in the Ministry, Ministry of Planning, Ministry of Finance, as well as the component that they're doing with Sa'afa, so they're trying to get students trained up so that they too can help with improving their database and over time we'll have all these buildings on the database with all those matrices in there. The information generated by the database will also inform when an asset has reached a point of being considered obsolete and will ultimately provide policy makers the evidence to make better use of limited resources. For the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, Glenn Simon reporting.