Community Action Specialist Ms Rosanne Purnwasie faces a huge challenge. She is responsible for implementing the Community Action Component of the Citizens’ Security Programme which was re-launched earlier this year by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The programme – funded mainly by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank – is the administration’s most ambitious attempt at security sector reform since 1992. It appears to have replaced the UK’s Department for International Development-funded Security Sector Reform Action Plan which was aborted in controversy last year.
The programme aims at assisting in decreasing the current crime rate in the country by employing crime and violence-prevention strategies through three components – capacity-building of the Ministry of Home Affairs, modernization of the Guyana Police Force and implementation of the Community Action Component. The third, arguably, is the most visible because it will attempt to transform the lives of young persons in communities. It will also facilitate projects which are geared to promote community cohesion and intra-community camaraderie.
The Community Action Component’s main objective is to encourage young persons – especially school dropouts between the ages of 14-25 years – to realise their responsibilities. It seeks to boost their self-esteem by enhancing their capacities and by providing opportunities that will prevent them from participating in criminal and violent activities. It is hoped that, by so doing, the culture of violence and crime in society will be broken and communities can become sustainable neighbourhoods in which all residents are included in the creation of a safe environment.
Communities in the Demerara-Mahaica and East Berbice-Corentyne regions – most of which seem to have been rocked by crime and violence over the past decade – have been targeted for attention. But there are pitfalls along the way. At one interactive session at Port Mourant, for example, Ms Purnwasie discovered that 60 per cent of the young people there were illiterate. There was also a serious narcotics-abuse problem community.
Implementation of the component will involve the launching of a skills and vocational training programme aimed at empowering and equipping young people with skills so that they can make their contribution to their communities. These skills include cosmetology, electronics, information technology, joinery, mechanics and welding. Ms Purnwasie feels that, concurrent with this training, will be personal development including upgrading of literacy and numeracy skills, conflict resolution, and personal relations. This is a tall order!
That is not all. The component will include entrepreneurial training for young persons who have the aptitude to run their own business. It is intended to be linked in an apprenticeship or internship arrangement with established businesses. Each community, moreover, will be asked to identify three ‘rapid impact’ projects valued at $1M – which may include the rehabilitation of a multi-purpose facility – that will contribute to the development of extra-curricular activities such as sports.
Ms Purnwasie’s challenges, given the known problems in the national education system, are enormous. She must administer a complex educational, vocational curriculum with limited resources in an extremely short period of time. The programme hopes to remould the lives of young adults who might already have attitudinal and educational deficiencies and are described as being “at risk” and “out of school drop-outs” and who live in troubled communities.
Ms Purnwasie must try to correct educational deficiencies, inculcate entrepreneurship, teach new skills and improve interpersonal relations with regard to conflict and violence and enhance self-esteem, all in six months – accomplishments to which even the national education system cannot aspire.
If, indeed, citizens’ security and the tranquillity of troubled communities will depend on this programme, Ms Purnwasie has much work to do.
