On January 17, 2003, Helene-Marie Gosselin, Director of the UNESCO Office of the Caribbean, and Professor the Hon. Rex Nettleford, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, signed a Memorandum of Understanding for UNESCO and UWI to cooperate in the field of HIV/AIDS and Education, particularly in the areas of research, advocacy, training and publications. The MOU is one of the first of its kind for UNESCO globally. UNESCO was given specific responsibility by the United Nations General Assembly in 2001 to support Member States - including those in the Caribbean - in the fight against the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS through its areas of competence: education, culture, communication and science. Regional organisations in the Caribbean, including UWI, equally have a role to play in fighting the epidemic. The new partnership between UNESCO and UWI was established to accelerate the response of one sector - Education - that has not been sufficiently active. While UNESCO is also working on several other fronts in this field, it views its cooperation with UWI as a particularly important strategy. This report, summarising accomplishment of the first year of cooperation, is appropriately carried in this special issue of Caribbean Quarterly, one of the instances of UNESCO-UWI collaboration. Enhancing UWI's capacity through international exchange. UNESCO enabled Michael Kelly, Professor of Education of the University of Zambia, to continue his work with UWI professors in development of a strategic framework for the response of the Caribbean's education sector to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, marrying two decades of experience of sub-Saharan Africa and the realities of this region. UNESCO also facilitated publication of the book that resulted: Education & HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean by Michael Kelly and Brendan Bain (reviewed by Alfred Sangster on page XX of this journal). UNESCO facilitated the presence of presidents of universities of Haiti and Guyana to interact with senior UWI administrators on HIV/AIDS at the UWI/UNESCO/UNICA-sponsored conference of October 2003 and also created an opportunity for dialogue between international HIV/AIDS Education specialist, Inon Schenker, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and UWI. Supporting UWI research. Two lines of preliminary research were initiated at the Mona Campus of UWI with UNESCO support, presumably among the first instances of research that assess the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on education in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Child Development Centre, in collaboration with the UWI HIV/AIDS Response Programme, HARP (in turn supported by the European Union), undertook a case study in the parish of St. James, Jamaica, of the epidemic's effect on early childhood education. The result is reported in this issue of CQ. The second research, still ongoing, is led by Professor Wilma Bailey (Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences) and Dr Affette McCaw-Binns (Faculty of Medicine) and assesses the impact of the epidemic on demand and supply for primary and secondary education in Jamaica. …