Brain drain continues to be primary challenge to development – Education Minister

Jul 18, 2015 News

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The level of migration of skilled workers and university graduates continues to be perhaps the primary challenge to sustainable human resource development.

This daunting state of affairs was highlighted by Minister of Education, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, as he addressed the opening of 27th Council of Human and Social Development (COHSOD) at the Caricom Secretariat on Thursday.
Pointing out the fact that there can be no discussion on Education and Human Resources Development without the inclusion of the Caribbean Diaspora, the Minister acknowledged that “we have so far failed to develop a holistic regional mechanism for incorporating the human resource talents of the Diaspora in any sustained and meaningful way.”
He underscored that while the Region as a whole may not be able to immediately offer competitive remuneration, there is room for innovatively engaging the Diaspora either via new initiatives or the restructuring of existing systems.
“The US Fulbright Scholarship, the Peace Corps and Canada’s Executive Service Overseas and the Commonwealth, are examples of bilateral and multilateral initiatives that can perhaps be guided by a coordinated policy that places primacy on Diaspora involvement,” the Education Minister told his regional counterparts.
The Minister at the forum stressed that the wider issue of human resource development is one of the critical challenges the Region currently facing that has to do with “how we effectively manage development-related research at both the national and regional level.”
In sharing an example, he noted that while the lessons of the Trinidadian and Jamaican education system reforms would no doubt be invaluable to how Guyana undertakes its own reform, there is yet no established regional mechanism via which local research, development and planning personnel can readily access those findings.
As such, he added that functional cooperation in this sense has had severe limitations, despite its relative successes in specific areas such as health and sport for example.
“Inextricably linked to the concept of regional research integration, which is in essence what I am recommending, is the issue of ICT development,” said Dr. Roopnaraine as he continued by underscoring that “the nature of ICT at present, from cloud computing to social media, represents a tremendous opportunity for us in CARICOM.”
But according to him there are challenges which remain both in policy and in practice.  The wide disparity in bandwidth availability across the Region is one hurdle that “we must seek to overcome with some urgency,” he therefore stressed.
As part of his deliberations, Thursday, Dr. Roopnaraine, who recently assumed the Education Minister portfolio, said that it was a few weeks ago that it became clearer than ever to him, that the education system was failing large sections of the youth demographic. Moreover, he noted that it was seen as imperative to effect significant reforms in the education sector.
This was despite the fact that a number of Guyana’s students has consistently performed creditably and, in some cases, outstandingly in the CSEC and CAPE examinations.   “This has not distracted us from identifying some worrying trends in the underperformance of our students overall.”
“My first act was to commission a comprehensive operational audit of our schools throughout our 11 educational districts as a precursor to what will be an extensive Commission of Inquiry into the state of public education in Guyana; our findings so far have revealed some endemic issues,” related the Education Minister.
And according to the Minister, the briefing document of COHSOD confirms that “the problems we face at the Ministry of Education of Guyana are shared across the region.” He pointed to the fact that the statement on the findings presented to the 25th Inter-Sessional Meeting indicates that “we are perhaps in a state of pre-crisis in education.
The statement reads in part: “The presentation painted a disturbing empirical and statistical picture of systemic failure and lamented in particular the inherent inefficiencies and wastage in the systems, highlighting the less than optimum outcomes for students…”
Minister Roopnaraine asserted though that “it is not that we are not spending money on education – education budgets have consistently represented the largest single allocation of national budgets across most territories.”
But according to him, the budgetary allocation does not necessarily reflect external inputs since for example, there was the US$150 million IDB-funded 10-year programme to overhaul the Trinidadian education system between 1999 and 2009.
“It is clear that we must look deeper into the problems that plague education in the region,” asserted the Minister as he added that “not to prejudice the outcome of any review of the system, I would yet offer that we have been, by and large, conservative societies, with our establishment’s best and brightest the products of a pedagogy that has perhaps outlasted its usefulness and its relevance within the present context.”

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