Remarks by the Pro-Chancellor and Chair of Council

USP Solomon Islands Graduation
September 2025

Salutations:

  • Your Majesty King Tupou VI, King of Tonga and Chancellor of the University of the South Pacific
  • Your Excellencies Members of the Diplomatic Corps
    Members of the Judiciary
  • Honourable Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Solomon Islands
  • Members of Cabinet
  • Members of Government
  • Council
  • Senate Members
  • Development Partners
  • Sponsors
  • Distinguished Guests
  • Staff
  • Students
  • And above all – our graduates, your families, and those who have walked with you on this journey

Halo, Mālō e lelei and warm Pacific greetings.

Graduation is always a moment of deep significance – but here in Solomon Islands, that significance carries an even richer meaning.

To each of you graduating today: we offer our heartfelt congratulations. Your achievement reflects not only your discipline and determination, but also the strength of your families, your communities, and the vibrant culture of Solomon Islands that has supported you every step of the way.

To all the parents, caregivers, siblings, sponsors, and friends who are here today – Tagio tumas. You were the ones who gave encouragement in the late nights, comfort in the hard times, and celebration in the good. Your quiet sacrifices and steadfast belief helped bring this moment to life.

This ceremony also marks an important moment for the University and for Solomon Islands. USP and Solomon Islands are deeply intertwined – through the thousands of graduates who serve across every sector, through the strength of this campus, and through a shared commitment to education as the foundation of national development.

We celebrate your success in a year when Solomon Islands has also demonstrated its leadership within our region. By hosting the 54th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, Solomon Islands reaffirmed its dedication to regional cooperation and to addressing the great challenges facing our shared Blue Pacific.

Yet we are all keenly aware of the pressing national issues that remain – challenges that demand innovation, courage, and leadership. Whether it is ensuring food and water security, adapting to the impacts of climate change, or building a sustainable economy that protects both environment and culture, these are the priorities that call for your knowledge and your skills.

Graduates of USP – in engineering, agriculture, environmental science, business, law, teaching, and many other disciplines – you are uniquely equipped to lead these solutions. You leave today not just with a qualification, but with a responsibility: to serve, to innovate, and to strengthen the nation that has invested in you.

This moment also comes as USP itself is resetting. Council has endorsed a bold and forward-looking Investment Plan for 2025–2027 – a plan that charts a course toward a more student-centred, digitally enabled, regionally cohesive, and financially resilient university.

And here I want to say something directly to Solomon Islands: USP must be more than just a university that serves you – we must be a university that reflects you. If USP were a mirror, you should see yourselves in us. We must look like you, sound like you, and ensure that our curriculum and research have real impact on your aspirations and priorities.

That is what it means for USP to be an enabler – shaping teaching, research, and innovation that rise from your realities, and ensuring that Solomon Islands does not just attend USP, but lives within USP.

This is the essence of Wansolwara – one ocean, one people, one destiny. Though we come from many islands and many nations, we are bound together by the same sea, the same challenges, and the same hopes. USP must be the vessel that holds this unity, and also the mirror that reflects it.

We do not mark this transition with hesitation, but with clarity and purpose. Like the great Pacific wayfinders, we draw on many stars – ancestral wisdom, contemporary knowledge, and regional realities. And like those navigators, we are guided by many hands: our students, our staff, our partners, and our twelve member countries.

And how fitting it is that this moment of institutional renewal is being presided over by Your Majesty, King Tupou VI – nearly six decades after your father, the late King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV, became USP’s very first Chancellor. That continuity is not only symbolic – it is powerful. It reminds us that this University was born of Pacific leadership, of regional unity, and of a shared belief in the transformative power of education.

To our graduates: you step into a Pacific that is both challenged and full of promise. Climate change, fragile economies, and social disruption are real and urgent. But so too is the potential – for innovation, leadership, healing, and change.

Whether you return home to serve your province, remain here in Honiara, move abroad, or enter government, teaching, business, health, or advocacy – your learning will matter. Your success will be measured not only by your career, but by your contribution to your families, your communities, and your nation.

You carry with you not only the hopes of your families, but the dreams of Solomon Islands and the wider Pacific. You are the living testament of the covenant between USP and its member nations: that through shared investment, we produce shared leadership for the future.

To our graduates: we honour you. We believe in you. And we welcome you into the proud ranks of USP alumni – now close to 70,000 strong – making their mark across Solomon Islands, across the Pacific, and across the world.

Your journey is only beginning. And our great Ocean – our Wansolwara – is wide with possibilities.

Mālō ‘aupito, tagio tumas.