Education is the key to employment and enterprise

Nov 01, 2015 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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(Address of His Excellency Brigadier David Granger, President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, to the 17th Award Ceremony of the President’s Youth Award Republic of Guyana, Saturday October 24, 2015.)

The Cooperative Republic of Guyana congratulates the 2015 class of awardees under the President’s Youth Award: Republic of Guyana (PYARG) scheme.

This youth development scheme began in 1998 with the aim of providing young people with the opportunities for personal development, wider exposure to their country and the chance to meet and interact with other young people from other parts of the country while committing to community service.
Awardees, today, must be commended for having passed through one or more of the various levels of the PYARG.
It is axiomatic that the future must belong to the young people. What this really means is that young people will inherit the earth. It is for you to grasp the opportunities that Guyana offers.
PYARG is meant to prepare you for the future:
·    Youth development must equip young people with the right education, the right attitudes and the right values to go out into the world and become productive and useful citizens.
·    Youth development must overcome the challenge of unemployment. Young people are leaving school and are facing great difficulties in securing satisfactory employment.
·    Youth development must give birth to a new generation of entrepreneurs, leaders and pioneers who are prepared to explore new avenues and opportunities in our economy.
Youths are the ones with the imagination to innovate, initiate and investigate.  They are the ones with the interest to communicate, network and exchange ideas through the new media. They have the intuition, energy, passion to propel change and pursue their personal goals. They have the independence to explore and travel.
The President’s Youth Award: Republic of Guyana, therefore, must be engineered to ensure that those who graduate with awards are better equipped to create employment, usually self-employment.
The scheme, if it is to make an effective contribution to youth development, cannot ignore the issue of youth unemployment. The Scheme, since its inception 17 years ago, has emphasised a five part programme of activities:
·    Volunteering: undertaking service to individuals or the community;
·    Physical Training: improving in an area of sport, dance or fitness activities.
·    Skills Development: developing practical and social skills and personal interests.
·    Expedition: planning, training for and completion of an adventurous journey.
·    At Gold level, participants must do an additional fifth Residential section, which involves staying and working away from home for five days, doing a shared activity
These activities are valuable. They are laudable. They help to mould character. They may be necessarily qualities for youth development but, given the changes taking place in the world today, they may not be sufficient.
Guyana is not an island unto itself. It faces challenges on its borders which it has not been able to resolve in 50 years. It faces competition from other countries which can produce our traditional commodities – rice, sugar, bauxite, gold, timber, fish – in greater quantities and at lower costs and distribute them to markets around the word more efficiently.
Guyana, equally, cannot expend scarce resources on youth schemes which do not actually benefit the youth. The so-called President’s Youth Choice Initiative, for example, established 15 years ago wasted millions of dollars. What is there to show for the effort?
Guyana, if it is to survive, must change its approach to youth development. The emphasis must be on education, education and education.
Education is essential in order to provide our young people with the knowledge they need to seek and secure jobs successfully.  It is increasingly clear, however, that while we may be graduating thousands of persons every year from various youth development programmes, many have been able to find satisfactory employment. Many young people migrate to neighbouring countries of further afield. Many remain and slide into unemployment.
Guyana, further, suffers from high unemployment and school dropout rates. The report of the Caricom Commission on Youth Development – ‘Eye on the Future: Invest in Youth Now for the Community Tomorrow’ – noted, among other things, that the primary education dropout rate was “at a staggering height.”  Joblessness among young people in the Caribbean Community at an average of 23 per cent was higher than many other developed and developing countries.
PYARG’s focus, therefore, has to be on the type of education that prepares youths for employment. Most particularly, youths must be exposed more intensively to information technology and entrepreneurship to enable graduates to start-up their own businesses and become independent.
The job market is increasingly influenced by technology, especially, information technology. Modern communications transmit information at the speed of light around the world. Machines are replacing human beings. Automatic banking machines are becoming substitutes for bank tellers. Accounting software has made a number of clerical positions in accounting departments redundant.
Young people, in such an environment, must become more entrepreneurial. They must be able to create businesses in the areas of services, small-scale manufacturing and agriculture.
A principal objective of the government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana is the creation of more jobs for more young people.  We want young people to be inheritors of not just any future but of a good life.
Education, employment and entrepreneurship must be emphasised as a critical aspect of youth development. Youth schemes such as the PYARG must place greater stress on education if it is to satisfy the needs of our large youth population. Education will help to secure a better future for those who graduate from the PYARG.
I wish all of you who are graduating today at the Bronze, Silver and Gold levels all success in the future.
I look forward to you becoming exemplars of the great promise that young people hold for our country’s future.

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