Charge d'Affaires Michael Scanlan's Remarks at MBA Donors' Conference

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and thank you for coming today.
Along with Janina Jaruzelski, I am honored to represent the United States Government at today's event as we are opening a new page in international cooperation between the United States, Latvia and Belarus, and we hope with your countries as well as we go forward together in launching a state of the art MBA program in Minsk. 

The United States has a national interest in supporting the development of a democratic and market-oriented Belarus.  The US Government does not always to see eye-to-eye with the Government of Belarus on what this means, my interview on TUT.BY this week touched on those points.  But the US Government has been consistent is saying that when we do find common ground or understanding on these core principles we will engage.  We see the MBA program as being just that; it will allow Belarusians to maximize their ambitions, skills and talents.  There is a robust pool of intelligent, competent, and hard-working Belarusians—there is no question of that.  This program will allow Belarus to harness this precious resource to grow its private sector and to facilitate its economic integration into the broader European and global market.

To date, despite its favorable geographical location and skilled and qualified workforce -- foreign direct investment to Belarus is lagging behind neighboring and regional economies.  The Government of Belarus has come to understand that to attract FDI it must grow the SME private sector as well improve the overall investment climate.

To achieve these ambitious goals, a new generation of working professionals is needed to facilitate the transition to a market based economy.  There is a strong correlation between the degree of management training and the performance of a company: managerial weaknesses are usually at the heart of small business failure.  When foreign investor looks at a market, the pool of local management talent is one of the first things an investor looks at since importing management talent is expensive and not as effective as homegrown talent.

For more than a decade, at a reduced level the USG has supported business education development in Belarus, but now we see both the demand and the necessary conditions to go to this new level of engagement -- and a critical factor has been the political support from the government for this project.  There were three conditions that had to be met for this project to have chance from the very beginning -- a stand alone building, a legal right to instruct in English, and clear commitment to external standards for accreditation.  In six months the Government of Belarus met these critical pre-conditions for this ambitious project. 

Thus US Government is happy to announce that over the 5-year life of the project we will work with U.S. Congress to allocate up to $4 million to this project.  Our investment will depend on the actual progress towards the project’s goals and benchmarks that are being jointly established. 

The US Government contribution lays the foundation for other donor involvement as we bring not only material resources but also our strong commitment to remain engaged in the implementation of the project through our Embassy, USAID, and our implementers.  We will also maximize our financial investment by having through our Fulbright program a U.S. MBA school professor on the faculty each year, as well as take Belarusian professors and business educators to the US to get firsthand knowledge of how US business schools operate.

I wish to also take the time here to acknowledge and thank the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Latvian Embassy to Belarus for its leadership role, the Rector and the School of Business and Management Technologies of the Belarusian State University for its relentless commitment to the project, and the Government of Belarus --- and hopefully your governments will join us in the development over the next few years of a full-fledged MBA program with European accreditation.

We have high expectations and high confidence in the success of this project.