— to complement National Youth Policy

YOUTH participation and development should be at the top of any government’s agenda since it has been touted and said on many occasions that youths are the future.
Guyana, with a large youth population, has been growing and will grow even more with the advent of oil and gas industry.

In order to capitalise on the benefits and growth of the country, government has taken the National Youth Policy back to Cabinet to make adjustments for the oil and gas sector.
While work on the policy continues, the Department of Youth and the Guyana National Youth Council (GNYC) has collaborated to finalise the National Strategic Youth Development Action Plan 2019-2024.

President of the GNYC, Quacy Grant, said the action plan will supplement the policy to ensure that implementers are held accountable.
“Government, specifically the Ministry of Social Cohesion, decided to do a five- year action plan to measure how they are coming with project and programmes… the plan will align itself with the policy document,” said Grant.

The National Youth Policy was passed by the National Assembly in 2016 with the intention of improving the social, emotional and cultural skills of young people, producing a productive and enterprising youth workforce, developing quality education and market-oriented skills, encouraging leadership, participation and representation and promoting good health, security and safety.

The action plan will be aligned with those objectives and will state concretely what the government will do to enhance the lives of the young people.

“This action plan will just state the concrete action that government will do to address the key issues which the young people highlighted when they drafted the policy,” said Grant.
He said the action plan was drafted by an international youth development specialist who had visited Guyana and met with stakeholders.

The specialist drafted the document which is being reviewed by stakeholders who will make additional input.
Grant said the GNYC was privileged to be one of the stakeholders responsible for improving the document.

The first discussion on the action plan was held last month and the second one was held on Friday with 22 partner organisations.

BETTER DOCUMENT
“We are having consultancy sessions so that we can sensitise partners and individual youth members about the action plan and get the action plan where we want it to be…. What they want to see is change, and to better and improve the document,” said the GNYC president.
After the document is finalised, Grant said it will be handed to the ministry and taken to Cabinet for approval. The GNYC’s hope is for the plan to get funding and be in the next budget. Since it is slated to start this year, the Council hopes that Government will start rolling out the plan from the end of the year.

GNYC had raised several concerns over the little to no apparent progress made on implementing this policy, particularly through the 2016-2020 National Youth Empowerment Action Plan (NYEAP) which requires a review at the end of the five-year period.
Minister of Social Cohesion with responsibility for Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr. George Norton, had said his ministry is in the process of taking back the policy to Cabinet to make some adjustments and to have Cabinet’s input.

“The fact that we’re going to take the whole policy back to Cabinet tells us that nothing there is written in stone and we might need to change what’s there,” he said.
According to the policy, “… The National Youth Policy will be periodically reviewed and updated within five years, or earlier if it becomes necessary.”

Minister Norton said it had definitely become necessary for an earlier review of that policy.
“We don’t necessarily have to wait till [2020], if we think that there is need for us to do some changes before, which I want to support; we’ll go ahead and do so.”

Weighing-in also was Director of Youth, Melissa Carmichael-Haynes, who had said: “we want the young people to know that it is not a case where the youth policy is not in action; we have had some delays.”
She shared that the policy is “actionised” by the Department of Youth and is used as a guide for the work being done by the department.