– community youth empowerment programme ahead
In the wake of alarming results from its recent recruitment drive, the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) is reaching out to unsuccessful applicants with remedial classes — the aim being to enable them to pass the entrance examination.
The project is also rooted in the belief that strategic intervention in depressed communities could play a major role in weaning the youths away from a life of crime, Acting Army Chief of Staff Colonel Bruce Lovell said yesterday.
Lovell revealed that of the 393 youths who wrote the basic army entrance examination, which is pitched at the “Common Entrance level”, only 68 were successful, representing a mere 17.3%.
Lovell was speaking at the opening of the swine-breeding project at the GDF Farm at Farm, East Bank Demerara. He commented on several initiatives which he said the army will pursue to influence the nation’s security.
He said the changing security paradigm impels armies, especially in developing countries, to no longer confine their activities to traditional defence issues but to adopt a more holistic approach to national security.
Lovell told those gathered that the army was also in the process of formulating a project for youths of depressed communities that would seek to empower them, providing technical and vocational education delivered to them right in their communities after school hours using either schools or community centres as places on instruction.
However, the remedial classes’ project is a smaller and immediate initiative, which the army has planned.
Lovell explained that the army’s passion for youth empowerment springs from an enlightened self interest with the overarching principle being to prevent them from embracing crime.
He said too that as the army sought to shape the national security environment it would be engaging in strategic partnerships with several government and non-governmental agencies for the provision of training for ranks.
He added that in some instances the agencies alone with ranks would train and equip young people with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to empower them.
Lovell said the army was duty bound to play a role in guaranteeing the economic security of the country, since economic security was one of the pillars on which the nation’s overall national security architecture rested.
President Bharrat Jagdeo who also addressed the gathering, in brief remarks had said he felt that the family structure had broken down in many ways and guidance was not always available to youth.
He noted that some families were also fatherless and many mothers were left to struggle alone.
“I want to replace that, with advise from the army… because we need to better support them,” he said. He acknowledged that some young people were being seduced by crime.
The President also referred to the $100 million fund for single-headed households, which he said would help provide varying facilities so that parents would be able to pay more attention to their children. “Because many of them practically grow up alone and so they take their advice from the street corner,” he said.
