IN flowering out Guyana’s potential to be a global success story, the national development agenda’s utmost concern must be cultivating the Guyanese human capital resource base, and preparing the country to be a fertile ground for innovative solutions, design thinking, and intelligent citizen participation. This must be a top concern. This country’s success depends on its people being of high-class education. It is imperative that education, literacy, and skills cultivation become the number one goal in the national development agenda.
Government, in its development manifesto, outlined a comprehensive strategy to phase in free education countrywide from nursery to university. This is laudable. At least for a first degree at the University of Guyana, citizens should be channelled and streamed through high school into completing their tertiary education. Guyana has already developed a tertiary education system that encompasses UG, technical institutes in the three counties, and the GuySuCo training centre. Yet, it is troubling that scores of young citizens in villages and inner cities suffer from a level of illiteracy that is unacceptable. Indeed, much of petty criminality and street crimes occur because illiterate young people roam too many corners of this dear land.
The top development agenda must be to ensure that every citizen is able to tap in to the socio-economic opportunities that government is working so hard to open up; no citizen should fall through the cracks. One case showcases what’s possible. Guyana stands in an admirable posture regarding the community of persons with visual impairment. Under Education Minister Priya Manickchand’s leadership, back in those pre-2015 days, the community of persons with visual impairment took a leap forward in their living standards. This is because they moved from being condemned to a life of destitution with little or no higher education, to being able to attend UG and study for fields they found interesting.
Today, a big percentage of persons with visual impairment do not spend their days idly at the blind institute. Rather, they are well educated, with most moving on from high-school education to the university. They are versed in technology, and many are gainfully employed. The era of destitute, visually impaired persons is over. In fact, the community through the Blind Institute formed a strong informal partnership with Canada-based, visually-impaired technology expert Raj Tribhuwan that rapidly transformed their lifestyles.
Today, Tribhuwan and leader of persons of the visually impaired community, Ganesh Singh, maintain close contact as Singh works hard, succeeding in elevating the community. This is one example of what’s possible for the Guyanese human capital resource pool: nothing stops the country from becoming a global hub of educated, technology-savvy people who can take on high-level projects, innovate new solutions, and play a significant role in national affairs. Having an educated workforce is a prerequisite for rapid national development. Guyanese by nature are go-getters, and full of enterprising solutions. Transferring this natural ability into a national pool of highly skilled citizens, could only be for the good of the nation.
One challenge is to make education at UG free for all citizens. There are all kinds of costs, including hiring lecturers, maintaining classroom facilities, and providing course materials. But such a challenge is not insurmountable. With the new roll-out of online UG courses that Minister Manickchand announced recently, students could study anywhere once there is efficient wifi connection. Also, school buildings around the country, even in far-flung hinterland locations, could become evening classrooms for adult education for citizens who are not yet technologically savvy to use computers at home. These school buildings could operate computer hubs where citizens could make use of in the evenings and enrol in UG courses, even completing degrees.
Also, first-degree graduates, and even graduates who complete their post-grad studies, could be co-opted to volunteer as lecturers in these adult education centres around the country, in a form of giving back for receiving a free UG degree or government scholarship. The world is moving into a global system that rewards knowledge, experience, application of life experience, and the ability to design solutions that could be scaled and globalised. With a national culture that feeds on higher education, like the developed world, with every citizen streamed and channelled into a love for higher education and constant learning, Guyana’s future would be ideally secured.
In Asia, the focus on education, especially in India and China, is the single most important factor for the global rise of those countries. Countries all around the Pacific Rim and throughout Asia leapfrogged into developed status because they rolled out aggressive education plans. Today, Indians dominate most CEO positions in the U.S., Canada, and they’re making inroads even in Europe. The Chinese are known for their love of education and skills development.
Former General-Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, said this about the value of literacy to a nation’s progress: “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratisation, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right…. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realise his or her full potential.”
As opportunities open up for Guyanese to exercise new initiatives, design thinking, and solution generation, not only for local but also for international issues, the country must see the road ahead, and prepare the way. A massive bandwidth of possibilities would demand a citizenry that is able, equipped and ready to jump on board with new thinking, new ideas, new projects.
In fact, Guyana, with its relatively small population, could become a start-up mecca, because higher education would develop Guyanese into world-class thinkers and solution generators, who could brainstorm and mind-map entrepreneurial projects and social innovation solutions and digital businesses that could easily go global. A national focus on literacy, skills training, and tertiary education, for every Guyanese citizen, is possible today, and therefore it must be of utmost concern in the national development strategy.
