–Vice-President urges Essequibo youths

VICE-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo on Monday appealed to young people on the Essequibo Coast to equip themselves to take up leadership roles, given the great number of qualified human capital Guyana needs in light of its rapid development.

The meeting with the young people was the Vice-President’s third stop of the day on his outreach on the Essequibo Coast, where he met with fisherfolk during a cash grant distribution exercise, and then also met with farmers at a meeting at the Anna Regina Secondary School.

During the various engagements, the Vice-President reiterated to the gatherings the various plans, programmes and policies of the government to bring a better life to all Guyanese.

To the youths in particular, he emphasised the need for them to make use of the various opportunities being made available by the government, and ensure that they equip themselves to become the kind of future leaders that Guyana will need.

“We have a deficit of leadership in many parts. What is happening is that sometimes we are in a mindset of complaining. And the same people who complain, if they just put some effort into fixing things, they’ll move faster. But that requires training and leadership skills, and, often, people don’t have that. And if we’re going to change this country, we need leadership skills in all of our people, at all the different levels of our community,” the Vice-President said.

He reminded his audience that the government is simply not making demands of the youths, but is actively putting in place the tools to equip them to rise to the occasion, pointing to the massive rollout of scholarships through the Guyana Online Learning Academy (GOAL), and other training programmes such as the Board of Industrial Training (BIT) through the Ministry of Labour (MoL).

Several professional certificates have also been offered to Guyanese over the past two years through Coursera and other initiatives.

Through these various initiatives, the government is also going at length to facilitate courses for persons, from high school dropouts to the post-graduate and masters levels.

NECESSARY INFRASTRUCTURE
The government is also ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place to facilitate the learning, with the rolling out of wider Internet services across the country, thereby enabling persons to access the various courses, most of which are Online.

However, the Vice-President noted that despite all that is being done, he does not believe Guyanese are capitalising on the opportunities available as much as they should. He noted that thus far, just 561 persons from the Essequibo region have signed up for, and have been granted GOAL scholarships.

“We need not 561, we need maybe 3,000 people in this region to get scholarships, from undergraduate level all the way to post graduate masters, or a technical education,” Dr. Jagdeo noted.

He pointed out that if Guyanese do not upskill at an exponential rate, it will leave a worrying deficiency in human capital in several sectors, including health and hospitality.

“We have seven new hotels that are under construction right now; they will need about 3,000 people to work in the hotels. We don’t have people trained as yet for that, and we have probably another five new international hotels in the works, so we have about 12 new hotels that will need about 5,000 people,” the Vice-President told the gathering of young people.

He added: “In the health sector, when we finish building these six new hospitals and upgrading some of the existing ones, we will need maybe 2,000 health sector professionals; new health sector professionals that we have to train. So, with more jobs in those areas, young people have to start thinking about that already, because there is going to be a huge number of opportunities.”