THE most effective way of alleviating poverty is rapid growth alongside the provision of jobs at a living wage and creating opportunities for self-employment(land reform, credit and financing, market research, equipment, technology and business skills). The objective is an integrated employment strategy.The APNU+AFC objective is an integrated employment strategy which prioritises the following elements:
* Stimulating local and foreign investment by way of providing strategic infrastructure, targeted tax incentives and radically less burdensome administrative procedures;
* Pursuing options for attracting foreign investment, through the Diaspora, the Economic Partnership Agreement, the Gulf Cooperation Fund mechanism and from capital surplus economies;
* Creating special funds for specific, advantaged areas, and centres of excellence devoted to building needed skills, and for training in relation to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs);
* Accelerating the infrastructure development process by encouraging, for example, the use of public-private partnerships;
* Implementing quick-acting, results-oriented projects for job creation such as:
o An Environment Enhancement Programme(EEP);
o A Capital and Infrastructural Rehabilitation Programme (CIRP), for Georgetown and other urban and rural communities
* Designing and implementing a self-employment training component of the employment and growth strategy to prepare persons for self-employment in modern services, including services for ICT and SMEs, software development, business processes and medical records transcription.
* Addressing the interlocking challenges of a poor business environment with restricted access to capital and credit, taking advantage, as appropriate, of one or more of several existing international SME finance initiatives which provide financial and technical support:
o the G-20 Financial Inclusion Initiatives
o the SME Finance Challenge
o Feed the Future Initiative
o the EIB’s Micro-Finance Fund
o the EUR 100Mn Rural Impulse Fund II.
* Paying particular attention to the development of cheap energy from our hydro-power resources to facilitate diversification of the economy through the domestic development of higher added-value products based on the forward integration of the exploitation of our natural mineral resources: bauxite, gold, diamonds, semi-precious stones, hard rock, kaolin, silica sands, etc.