Hopper Lecture 2025 - Fostering Societal Growth

Fostering Societal Growth: Exploring How Inclusion Drives the Development Agenda

In 2025, Barbados enacted the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, which came just three months after the government introduced a seven-year policy aimed at addressing the needs of persons with disabilities. As contemporary development faces social, economic, political, and environmental challenges, it is essential for any society striving to achieve its goals to vigorously promote the inclusion of all its members.

All persons with disabilities need a space in which they can develop their full potential. That’s the legacy I want to leave.

Most Honourable Kerryann Iffil 

Guest Speaker

Ms. Kerryann Ifill is a well-known Barbadian activist who has ceaselessly promoted the rights of people with disabilities. Since losing her vision at the age of four, the 50-year-old has gone on to become the youngest person and first woman to be appointed President of the Barbados Senate. This was after becoming the first person with vision loss to complete a University of the West Indies degree (with Honours) at UWI's Cave Hill campus, before completing a Master of Business Administration and postgraduate diploma in Special Education.

Ms. Ifill has been one of the premier advocates for the adoption of assistive technology for children with special needs, from primary through tertiary levels. She has been instrumental in preparing Barbados' educational institutions to receive visually impaired students, one of whom went on to become Barbados’s first blind attorney-at-law. She has also served the wider disabled community of the Caribbean by advancing a more inclusive agenda regionally. She has served as President of the Barbados Council for the Disabled, President of the Barbados National United Society of the Blind, President of the Caribbean Council for the Blind, and Vice-Chair of the Commonwealth Disabled People's Forum. Her colleagues and admirers say that her advocacy has been so powerful it has created a ripple effect, encouraging others to work towards a more equitable and compassionate world.

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The 32nd annual Hopper Lecture, one of the university's flagship events, is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in honour of its founding president, David Hopper (President 1970-1978). Each year, an eminent international thinker provides a free public lecture about critical current and future issues in international development at the University of Guelph and a second Canadian university. Learn more about the Hopper Lecture and its past speakers