EARLIER this week, according to newspaper reports, the U.S. Department of Interior sponsored –  under its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement – a workshop, one designed to “sharpen the skills” of local officials with regard to their capacity for the management of oil and gas resources. A cross-sectoral workshop, coming under the US government’s Energy Governance and Capacity Initiative (EGCI), it afforded participants some insight into US policy on petroleum-related matters, from production to infrastructure to geology.
According to one report, under the EGCI, “Guyana has access to the US government’s top experts, along with their global expertise on issues related to petroleum geology, licensing, exploration and production operations, revenue management, policy reform, regulation and implementation…”, among other things.
I specifically want to focus on those last four areas, “revenue management, policy reform, regulation and implementation” as a point of departure for the general thrust of this article, i.e., ways in which we can prepare, in advance, for industries and initiatives that are projected to transform our economy.
Before I go back specifically to Guyana, I want to look at a specific example of China.  It is arguably only in the past decade, and indeed just the latter part of it, that China has definitively been identified as a serious challenge to US global hegemony.  Outside of the economic hurdles and jousting, a crucial aspect to that challenge has been the very real barrier of language, with the US having had the clear advantage with regard to linkages within the Western hemisphere.  What should be noted is, before it even gained the sort of economic and foreign relations muscle to flex in front of the globally influential Barack Obama administration, China was already preparing for its expanded presence in the Western hemisphere by creating solutions to the language issue at the very foundation, its education system.
According to  a scholarly article by Yuanyuan Hu, on January 18, 2001, China’s Ministry of Education issued a document entitled ‘Ministry of Education Guidelines for Vigorously Promoting the Teaching of English in Primary Schools’.  At the core of this policy is the type of model that I want to promote in this week’s article, the preemptive equipping of our people for the future.
This is something that naturally has a wide range of applications and because of this, I believe that the basic manifestation of any such policy should be at the level of a cross-sectoral mechanism, inclusive of the national information database that I have suggested at various times over the roughly four years of this column’s publication, but also inclusive of initiatives that actively engage people. 
For example, let’s look at the four aspects of petroleum industry policy that I singled out above.  Hypothetically speaking, the sort of system I envisage would have embedded in its regulation and implementation regime, a policy that would stipulate that companies investing in petroleum exploration and extraction, once benefiting from whatever state concessions, would have to contribute a percentage of whatever investment into a mechanism – whether it be a new institution, or something built into the University of Guyana structure – geared specifically to equip locals with the skills required for functioning either within that specific industry or a related field. 
Or maybe it can be that all contributory fees are deposited into a general consolidated account, managed by a board or some type of oversight body – I am not sure what the current status of what was formerly the State Planning Commission, but that – a forward-looking entity – is more or less what I have in mind.  The central idea is to create a system that manages our investment in the future, in a focused and directed way.  
Incidentally, there is no better time than to establish such a system, and see the results in a specific and measurable way – I am alluding of course to the President’s One Laptop Per Family (OLPF) initiative. 
With the OLPF, we are looking at more than just distributing 80,000 computers to Guyanese families simply so that people can become computer literate to varying degrees. According to the World Bank, Guyana had an Internet access penetration of around 205,000, meaning that a little less than a third of our population of around 750,000 had access to the Internet – and this was three years ago.  With the OLPF, that number is going to increase exponentially.
What we have here is the opportunity to create a national network, a system in which knowledge can be shared in studied and specific ways.  Once a basic computer literacy programme is complete,  that very same mechanism can be used to pilot and then generalize other training initiatives from anything to medical technology training, as a prerequisite to our increased advancement in the public health sector, to introducing young children to the basics of computer programming or web designing. 
The clear end result of all this – proposed investor-funded mechanism, OLPF-linked capacity building – is that we should see a drastic improvement in the human resources pool not simply for existing ventures, but more importantly fledgling initiatives and ones that are, though planned, still some time away from implementation. 
This must be an overarching system that incorporates or enhances the function of any related ministry or government agency. The Ministry of Labour, for example, has an Employment Bureau, which can be integrated to act as an intelligence-based conduit for both prospective employers as well as employees.
We have a brave new future ahead of us, and as we transition away from or transform some of our traditional economic activities, we are going to be forced to place a higher premium on preparation for avenues of growth, in anything from petroleum to eco-tourism to intellectual property.  We simply need to prepare properly for it.

PULL QUOTE:
We have a brave new future ahead of us, and as we transition away from or transform some of our traditional economic activities, we are going to be forced to place a higher premium on preparation for avenues of growth, in anything from petroleum to eco-tourism to intellectual property.  We simply need to prepare properly for it.