A university in a five-room flat: how the Barbados fraud's sister schools operated in Guyana, and why its accreditation council was part of the problem

When Barbados arrested the operators of Washington University of Barbados in October 2018, the trail led next door. According to reporting collected by Guyanese Online and regional outlets, the Barbados school was a sister institution of Alexander American University in Guyana, both set up by Venkata Rao Gopi, an Indian national wanted in India in connection with hundreds of fraud complaints. Between them, the reports say, the institutions defrauded more than 600 people, most of them students recruited from India through consultancies at fees of ₹30–40 lakh each. Students who learned that their school was unaccredited were, in some accounts, dismissed and removed from campus; the scandal was linked to at least one student suicide. Those accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Guyana's part in the story is what makes it instructive. One of the Guyana schools was accredited by Guyana's own National Accreditation Council — the body a diligent parent would have checked — and another institution named in the reports, Lincoln American University, was described as operating out of a five-room flat. Guyana at the time hosted more than a dozen offshore medical schools serving almost no Guyanese students; they existed to sell degrees to foreigners, and the local accreditation framework had not been built to ask whether those degrees led anywhere.

Barbados' Prime Minister Mia Mottley responded by promising legislation so that "Barbados must never have this indignity again", and Antigua and the Bahamas signalled similar intentions; commentators in Guyana called for the government to revisit every offshore school and tighten accreditation. That regional response is the reason the Caribbean is a safer place to study medicine today than it was in 2018 — but only at schools that answer the right questions.

The right questions are not "Is it accredited?" but "By whom, and what does that accreditation buy?" Accreditation by a national council in the host country is a licence to operate. What a student needs is accreditation recognised by the World Federation for Medical Education (in the Caribbean, CAAM-HP), acceptance by their own country's medical regulator, and, for anyone aiming at the United States, ECFMG eligibility and a record of graduates being licensed. The Guyana schools had the first and none of the rest. A family paying ₹35 lakh should be able to state, in one sentence, which regulator will license the graduate and why — and if the agent cannot say it either, the answer is nobody.