— young aspiring entrepreneurs to get help from Gov’t

PRESIDENTIAL Advisor on Youth Empowerment,Aubrey Norton,has said youths who successfully completed the Financial Literacy and Small Business Training Programme facilitated by his office will be assisted with accessing resources to make their business dream a reality.

Norton was at the time addressing the 23 participants,who successfully completed the five weeks programme,at a ceremony hosted at the Ministry of Education Department of Culture, Youth and Sport Resource Centre.
He said though youths are regularly seen as ‘a problem’, Government considers investment in their development as profitable.

“The Ministry of the Presidency sees young people as a human resource to be developed but too regularly young people are dealt with as if they are a problem. We do not believe they are a problem, we believe they are a human resource to be developed and once they are given the requisite training, then they will achieve their objectives,” the presidential advisor said.

His department has conducted several training for youths, including programmes in leadership, mentoring, counselling and early childhood education, to demonstrate that youths are resources to be developed and not neglected.
Norton also said Government recognises the high rate of unemployment and every effort is being made to address the situation.
While Government is not in a position to provide enough jobs to stop unemployment, it has adopted the responsibility of empowering them through training and wants them to become entrepreneurs.

“What Government can do is to, apart from providing some of the employment is to facilitate the training of young people so that they can become entrepreneurs and they themselves become creators of employment,” Norton pointed out.
And on that note, he said great attention is being placed on helping small entrepreneurs to properly manage their finance.

“This certificate in itself is not the end. It cannot be the end… at present you’re being certified. You’re given a piece of paper which says you have the capacity or you would have looked at the content of the course. It becomes qualification where you can operationalise it and put it into practice and to use it… so that you can achieve your objectives,” the youth empowerment advisor said.

He advised the participants of the course to see their certification as a first step in their journey to becoming entrepreneurs and not to be discouraged by early failure.
“Don’t see early failure as the end. See it as a challenge to learn more, to be surmounted and to get up and to go again until you receive your objective of becoming a young successful business person,” Norton said.
According to Norton, a combination of education and business can be a powerful tool to enable a better life.

“I believe if education is combined with business we will produce much better quality businessmen. I’m not saying that businessmen are not good quality. The combination of education and business skills is the kind of combination that will do Guyana well.”
He charged the students to develop self-discipline and make sacrifices in order to ensure the success of their businesses.
Meanwhile, programme facilitator,Patsy Russell congratulated the participants and acknowledged their high quality project proposals.