Is UBU’s Harry Potter-Inspired University Really Coming to Belize? Part 2

Why would Belize’s Ministry of Education (MOE) issue a warning notice against a promising 20,000-acre university? While it has been over 2 months since the notice was issued, the school has been in the works for years.

For over a decade, The Ultimate Business University (UBU) has been planning to build a massive, Harry Potter-inspired campus in Belize. The size of the school campus would be nearly three times the size of Belmopan.

As previously reported, UBU’s website details many of the features that the campus would offer. From thousands of student rooms, hundreds of employee bungalows, a vineyard, farmland, and even a golf course, UBU promises to be a state-of-the-art educational haven for any ambitious student.

Except, not any student would be able to enrol in UBU. The university will be “a non-profit organisation designed to support youths at risk”, according to its website. These youths will be U.S. citizens under the age of 18 who would be emancipated and then brought over to Belize on full scholarships.

The day that MOE issued the warning notice, News 5 contacted the ministry’s Chief Executive Officer, Dian Maheia. According to her, the ministry received a query about UBU, which prompted MOE to look into the university. The ministry’s research came down to issuing a warning stating that UBU “is neither legally registered nor authorised to operate as an educational institution in Belize and that it has no official affiliation or recognition from the Ministry of Education.”

On February 5th, the former Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, told reporters that his team was alerted, and the ministry was forced to take action. “It was brought to the attention of our communications team that these things were being posted and notices being sent out. So we had to take action,” he said.

Some of these “notices” were actually being sent out to Belizeans who were being recruited to be part of the project. The recruitment process was being done through LinkedIn, a platform professionals use to network, share career updates, and find job opportunities or business collaborations. The Belizeans that News 5 reached out to reported that they were contacted via LinkedIn directly by the founder of UBU.

Most of the names of these Belizeans were also found on UBU’s official website. They were listed as part of UBU’s team alongside the job title or responsibility they would be contributing to the university. Some of these same Belizeans were not aware their names were listed out already, with one saying that they made an application but never received confirmation of the position.

Meanwhile, Fonseca pointed out that the lack of background information about the people behind the school and the large-scale features it plans to implement does not sound “feasible or logical.” He added, “We get lots of proposals from institutions all over the world. You don’t know who the people are; you don’t know anything about them. My own view is that that would not be something that we would consider at all.”

He added that the government needs to be really cautious when considering institutions that want to establish in Belize. There are often concerns about entities that exist to exploit vulnerable people, which is a major reason why the government must always verify the legitimacy of any school operating in the country. “There’s a legal procedure in place for you to apply. Especially if you want to open some offshore school. Especially for those kinds of institutions, because so many of them have been associated with scams, fly-by-night institutions that are just taking people’s money,” Fonseca said.

According to the former minister, there is a legal process for applications of this scale. As stated in the ministry’s notice, UBU has not followed the legal process.

Part 3 coming soon.