The University of the West Indies broke ground on additional student housing at its Mona campus in St Andrew to address a housing shortfall that had become structural rather than occasional: with roughly 15,000 students enrolled, the campus had only 3,500 rooms available, according to the Gleaner.
The new development, delivered through a public-private partnership between UWI Mona and 138 Student Living Jamaica, was designed to add 1,584 student beds over three years, with the first 576 units targeted for the 2015-16 academic year. Under the partnership terms, 138 Student Living designed, built and would operate the new accommodation on land leased from UWI, with the buildings reverting to the university free of cost once the lease period ended.
UWI Mona Principal Professor Archibald McDonald framed the deal as more than a housing fix: a new direction for funding tertiary education in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, leaning on private capital and operating expertise rather than direct university capital spending to close an accommodation gap the university could not otherwise afford to close on its own timeline. The timing mattered for another reason too: the university was expecting a growing intake of students from the United States and Nigeria at Mona, adding international demand on top of an already-stretched local waitlist.
The PPP model, private developer builds and operates on leased university land, asset transfers back at the end of the lease, has since become a template other Caribbean universities facing the same structural gap have studied closely. Student accommodation is, functionally, purpose-built rental housing with a single institutional tenant standing behind demand, and UWI Mona’s arrangement remains one of the clearer examples of that model actually getting built at scale in Jamaica.
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