Are We Preparing Guyanese Children for the Jobs of 2035 or the Jobs of 1985?

Mar 22, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

---

By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA, Doctoral Candidate

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana is moving quickly; new roads, new hotels, new investment, and new expectations. We speak confidently about transformation, prosperity, and opportunity. We talk about the future as if it has already arrived.

But there is a harder question we must be willing to ask.

Are we preparing Guyanese children for the jobs of 2035, or are we still educating too many of them for the jobs of 1985?

It is a question I have repeatedly asked because it goes to the heart of whether our development will be broad-based and sustainable, or whether many of our children will be left standing on the sidelines of the very economy now being built around them.

The truth is that the world our children are entering demands far more than obedience, memorization, and routine performance. It demands literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, digital fluency, adaptability, confidence, communication, and the ability to keep learning over a lifetime. Employers increasingly value workers who can analyze information, use technology, collaborate with others, and solve unfamiliar problems. In a modern economy, these are no longer luxury skills. They are baseline skills.

But before we even get to coding, robotics, data, artificial intelligence, or STEM careers, we must confront a deeper national problem.

We have a massive literacy and numeracy crisis.

The data have been warning us for years. A widely cited World Bank project document on Guyana reported that in 2016 only 14 percent of Grade 2 students attained the standard in literacy and numeracy combined, while 41 percent were approaching the standard and 45 percent were below it. That alone should have forced a national reckoning.

And the concern remains urgent. Based on all the data to which we have access, we are not dealing with a minor weakness, we are dealing with a foundational emergency. In plain language, too many children are falling behind at the very stage when they should be learning to read with confidence and use numbers with ease.

And this is the point, I have repeatedly made; children who cannot read well will not be able to take advantage of STEM investments, no matter how generous those investments may be.

We can build beautiful labs. We can donate tablets. We can fund robotics clubs. We can launch coding camps and celebrate innovation. All of that is good, and all of that matters. But if a child struggles to read instructions, interpret a word problem, follow a sequence, write a response, or make sense of basic information, that child will remain locked out of the very opportunities we claim to be creating.

Literacy is not separate from STEM. Numeracy is not separate from innovation. They are the doorway into it.

A child who cannot read proficiently cannot fully access science.
A child who cannot work confidently with numbers will struggle to access technology, engineering, or finance.
A child with weak foundations will find the future harder to enter, no matter how many opportunities exist on paper.

That is why this issue matters so much in Guyana at this particular moment and this is why I do not understand why in our oil producing economy, our organization is not overwhelmed with offers of support from Guyana’s private sector to support learning pods in vulnerable communities across the country.

We are not a stagnant country. We are a rapidly changing one. The economy is diversifying. The labor market is evolving. Technology is reshaping how work is done. Artificial intelligence is changing how information is accessed and how productivity is measured. The jobs our children will face in 2035 will require stronger thinking skills, stronger communication skills, and stronger technical confidence than ever before.

Yet, too many of our systems, still reward children for passivity rather than initiative, recall rather than reasoning, and quiet compliance rather than curiosity.

That must change.

To be fair, the Ministry of Education has not ignored these challenges. The Ministry has invested in curriculum reform, grade-level standards, worksheets, literacy resources, and other measures aimed at strengthening foundational learning. The official resource platforms show a clear effort to provide structured Grade 2 literacy and mathematics materials, along with assessment guidelines and teacher support.

That work deserves recognition.

But the scale of the problem tells us that recognition alone is not enough. We need urgency, consistency, and a broader national response that matches the size of the crisis.

This cannot be left to schools alone. Parents must understand that reading is not a side issue. It is the issue. Communities must understand that numeracy is not only about passing math exams. It is about giving children the tools to function in a modern world. Policymakers, educators, civil society, and the private sector must understand that if foundational learning remains weak, then the promise of national development will remain uneven and their companies will not experience the exponential growth which a rapidly expanding oil economy portends.

A modern economy cannot be built on weak foundations.

What is also clear in the data is that the children who suffer most from weak foundational learning are usually not the children with the most advantages. They are the children in ordinary homes, in struggling communities, in households where parents are doing their best but may not have the time, money, or academic background to close the gaps alone. Those are the children for whom school must work. Those are the children for whom national policy must matter most.

If we fail them early, we do not merely create academic weakness. We create future exclusion.

So yes, let us invest in STEM. Let us expose children to robotics, coding, digital tools, and artificial intelligence. Let us dream bigger for Guyana’s children than previous generations were able to dream.

But let us also understand that the child who cannot read at grade level by Grade 2 is already being placed at a grave disadvantage. And the child who cannot use numbers confidently is already being pushed further from the center of the new economy.

That is why foundational learning must become a national priority with the same seriousness we attach to infrastructure, investment, and economic growth.

Because roads do not read, buildings do not calculate. Economies do not become inclusive by accident. People do. Children do but only if we prepare them.

The real question before us is not whether Guyana is developing. It is.

The real question is whether the average Guyanese child is being equipped to participate meaningfully in that development.

If the answer is no, then we are not yet preparing our children for the jobs of 2035.

We are preparing too many of them to be left behind by it.

---

• 2035, jobs, Karen Abrams, Prosperity, transformation

---