Remarks by Ambassador Scot Marciel at the Signing of MoU for Myanmar Scholars and Leaders Program
Remarks at the Signing of Myanmar Scholars and Leaders Program
Scot Marciel
United States Ambassador to Myanmar
Yangon University
Yangon, Myanmar
March 9, 2018
Minister and Dr. Myo Thein Gyi, It is always a pleasure to see you and always to hear from you about your personal commitment to improving the quality of education in this country. It’s a goal we strongly support, so wonderful to see you. And Elaisa, my friend from the Burmese American Community Initiative, thank you for all the work that you have done to help organize this. I want to thank Dr. Pho Kaung, the Rector of Yangon University, for being a good partner and also agreeing to let us use the university for this important event.
As the minister said, in Myanmar, just like in the United States, education and improving the quality of our education is the key to our future. And because my country, my government, is very committed to helping the people of Myanmar achieve their goals. We always are looking for opportunities to support people who are working so hard here to make progress and no place and no issue I would say is more important than continuing to strengthen education. We’re best in the United States because we have a relatively large community of people from Myanmar who now live in the US, and the Burmese American Community Institute is a great example of how that community in the United States with its natural, cultural, and family ties to this country can help us work together to build our partnership.
A wonderful thing about working together in education is that it helps create wonderful educational opportunities for the people of Myanmar, and it also helps to build closer relationships between our people and between our universities and all of that is very important to us. So, I want to congratulate and thank the Ministry of Education, as well as BACI, for launching the Myanmar Scholars and Leaders Program. This is going to provide scholarship opportunities for graduate study in the United States. We, in the United States are proud that we have a quite strong system of colleges and universities, something that has been a priority for us for many years, and we’re pleased also that so many people from around the world take the opportunity to study in the United States.
One of my goals is to try to create more opportunities for people from Myanmar to study in the United States. Some of this we will do, in our doing through the US government, but in the United Sates, so much is done by NGOs, private sector, and universities themselves, and this program is a great example; it’s really an initiative from BACI working closely with the Ministry of Education. We hope and believe it’s going to create a lot of opportunities for Myanmar students to study in the US, but also in that process, continue to build, bring our countries closer and closer together.
So, I’m very delighted to be here. I will put in a quick advertisement for a few of our other programs in education, like the Fullbright Scholarships and know that we have what we call Education USA, which is free advising centers for people who are interested in studying in the United States. We have those here Yangon, as well as in Mandalay. So Minister, if you will pardon me for doing a little advertising, but it’s all in the interest of promoting closer education cooperation and ties. So once again, congratulations and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to join today.
