GOAL scholarships - how about a progress report?

GOAL scholarships – how about a progress report?

Oct 21, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

According to the press report, Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister ‘rapped’ the Leader of the Opposition regarding disparaging comments about the status of youths in the society.

In the former’s peroration, he is reported to have remarked as follows:

“Programmes such as the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) providing thousands of world class scholarships – from Certificate to PhD levels, the Board of Industrial Training TVET certification programme – aimed at up-skilling and empowering hundreds of youths in every administrative region; the dozens of Women’s Entrepreneurial initiatives introduced across the country by the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security, and the young professionals and low-income turnkey housing drives in all of our regions among others”.

Once again, one is attracted to the persistent reference to the ambitious GOAL programme, previously much highlighted by, for example, the Minister of Education.

It was in August 2021 that there was published the comprehensive 20-page Supplement announcing the availability of these scholarship awards to the following Universities:

International University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Jain University of India
UWI Open Campus
University of Southern Caribbean
Indira Gandhi National Open University
Sherlock Institute of Forensic Science
Structuralia Universidad Internacional Isabeli, Spain
UNICAF University and Partners (Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, UK)
Texila American University, Guyana

Together the total of 108 programmes ranges from Certificates to Masters; and from two months to three years. The respective periodicities are distributed as follows: 3 years – 22; 2 years – 23; then 1 year – 28; 6 months – 33; 4 months – 1; and 2 months – 1.

So at this point in time, it should be reasonable to expect reports on the results of the 64 programmes which range from 2 months to 1 year.

The Universities to which awards of the shorter programme were reported to be made include the following:

Jain University of India – 36 programmes of 1-3 years

UWI Open Campus – 22 six monthprogrammes

Indira Gandhi National Open University – 25 programmes ranging from 6 months to 3 years. They include 120 awardees to a two-month programme in Motor Cycle Service and Repair; 450 awards to the Certificate Course in Food and Nutrition.

In the circumstances, it seems an opportune time to more effectively incite youths wherever, to seize their chances, by emphasizing the successes achieved so far. Not only youths, but adults and communities at large deserve to know, for example, what job levels would have been achieved. There is the remarkable absence of the usual photographs of any group of ‘certificated’ achievers, an exercise that would obviously lend credibility to such a developmental project.

In the process, it would do no harm to widen invitation to opportunities in the TVET programme.

In the final analysis however, one depletive nuance to the Administration’s communication exercise is that it utilized a junior representative to remonstrate, so to speak, the highest level of the opposition.

Regards
E.B. John

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