Introduction
In 1999, a decade after the introduction of the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) created a more facilitating environment for the operation of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), I wrote a series of articles highlighting the work of national and international NGOs. Since then several of the international NGOs and many of the national NGOs that had mushroomed mainly because of the availability of funding have ceased operation while others responding especially to the crises in the health and education sectors have burgeoned. The Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) was among the first in series of articles. It had recommenced operation in Guyana in 1989 after a thirteen-year lapse and by 1999 had implemented two five-year programmes. In this article, the work of VSO in Guyana will once again be highlighted.
VSO: SHARING SKILLS
Voluntary Service Overseas is a United Kingdom-based charity with over forty years of experience in international volunteering. By 2001, it was working in forty countries with some 2,000 volunteers serving overseas at any one time and 30,000 returned volunteers in all walks of life in many countries of the world. Originally, it recruited its volunteers from the developed countries of the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands but within recent years has been able to tap the surfeit of professionals available in some developing nations and now also recruits from Kenya, Uganda, India and the Philippines.
A dynamic organization, its contribution and focus has evolved in consonance with the changing development environment and since the mid 1990’s has set out its vision in a series of strategic plans. The first, focused on Investing in people while the second concentrated on Increasing the Impact. Its goal was that by 2003 VSO would place a stronger focus on working with disadvantaged people and would be well equipped “to respond flexibly to changing circumstance and opportunities”. Its success is reflected in its receipt in 2004 of the International Development Charity of the year award. Its most recent strategic plan Focus for Change sets out the six development goals through which it hopes to help fight global poverty and disadvantage. Those goals – Education, HIV and AIDS, Disability, Health and Social Well Being, Secure Livelihoods and Participation and Governance reflect the intent of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which are described as “A compact among nations to help end human poverty.” VSO goals provide the framework within which individual countries prioritise those that are most relevant to local needs and are used to create individual strategic plans.
VSO GUYANA: – HELPING
TO CHANGE LIVES
The changing nature and scope of VSO Guyana’s programme reflect the dynamism and commitment to change of the international organization. In the period 1989 – 2003 VSO Guyana’s Programme evolved from a mere gap filling exercise to one where its volunteers were actively involved in training and capacity building of its partners primarily in the public and NGO sectors in the area of Education and Disability. During the period, it provided about three hundred volunteers, one hundred and eighty one or 61% of whom served in the Education sector. It has evaluated its achievement as follows: “the over 400 volunteers’ years the VSO contributed to education in Guyana revealed that, classroom delivery did not improve the long term quality of teaching, did not reduce migration of trained teachers, was appreciated by the MOE but did not contribute to improvements in their plans.” However, as this writer observed in 1999, “for the first time in many years, prominent senior secondary and several junior secondary schools had enough qualified Maths and Science teachers to prepare students for CXC and GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels with significant successes, while for the first time two interior schools required teacher trainers. Not only students benefited but untrained and under qualified teachers were upgraded so that they could be admitted to CPCE for further training.”
The current Education Programme Area Plan 2005-2009 aims “to tackle disadvantage in the education system through working at the higher levels of education policy and curricula design, the intermediate level of education management development and the grassroots level civil society support and empowerment for education development”. In keeping with the MDG goal of ensuring that by 2015 all children everywhere will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling, the focus will be on children in the rural and hinterland areas, specifically the training of nursery and primary teachers in four hinterland regions to deliver quality education and to improve the regional education management system so that it could effectively manage and monitor Special Education Needs (SEN), Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Distance Education (DE) through placing volunteers with CPCE, NCERD and the innovative Education For All Fast Track Initiative placing volunteers with CPCE, NCERD and the innovative Education For All Fast Track Initiative, VSO Guyana also hopes to support the development of “an enabling and motivating environment for teachers.”
One of the most valuable aspects of VSO’s Inclusive Education is the crosscutting and overlapping with its focus on Disability, especially in the area SEN. From the inception, VSO has contributed to the health sector but in keeping with its evolving focus has shifted to working with disability. Far more than in Education this intervention allows VSO to work with partners in Civil Society and to empower people especially the most disadvantaged – the disabled and women. VSO has assessed its impact on disability in Guyana over the past seven years as “addressing immediate needs and less strategic in nature
