CARICOM Secretary-General Edwin Carrington has called on education ministers to pay more attention to out-of-school and unemployed youth, as they seek to advance the youth development agenda within the context of human and social development.
The Secretary-General was delivering the keynote address at a ceremony which marked the official opening of the 20th Meeting of the CARICOM Council for Human and Social Development on Education, in Georgetown on Monday, said a press release from the CARICOM Secretariat at Turkeyen.
Underscoring the theme ‘Investing in Human Resources for the Benefit of All’, Carrington told the gathering of education ministers and stakeholders that there was need for “a more rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of programmes and policies for out-of-school and un-employed youth.”
He pointed to the plethora of social and economic consequences of not investing in unattached youth.
Those, he stated, included the inability to realize development goals; under-developed and under-utilised human and social capital, increased violence and crime and loss of economic productivity.
He also made reference to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), noting the challenges faced by the United Nations in achieving the targets and emphasized that those targets would not be fully realized unless the needs of youth were fully met.
“Out-of-school and un-employed youth must be a major constituency for programmes designed to achieve all those goals,” he emphasized.
The Secretary-General’s call was underscored by youth leader Stephen Roberts who asserted that no youth should be left behind and called for the regional education policy makers to review and re-organise the education system to make it more meaningful and more relevant to the needs of young people.
Roberts also focussed on the critical role that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) must play in driving the education system in the Caribbean.
“Our education,” he said “must empower youth to be assertive and to assume leadership roles in the Global Village.”
And Education Minister Shaik Baksh, who is the Chair of COHSOD, highlighting the issue and linking the theme of COHSOD with the findings of the Report of the CARICOM Commission on Youth Development (CCYD), he stressed that investing in human resources was a critical imperative that could not be ignored in light of the dismal reality of the situation of Caribbean youth.
He lamented that critical mandates on the youth agenda had been kept in abeyance for several years, but expressed the hope that the decisions and recommendations made at this COHSOD meeting would be accepted and implemented by the governments of the region.
Education ministers at the opening ceremony were informed of the slate of deliverables that COHSOD had achieved over the past decade.
CARICOM Assistant Secretary-General, Human and Social Development, Dr Edward Greene said he was satisfied that the COHSOD had delivered on 95% of its mandates for the ten-year period which started in 2000.
Dr Greene, who has been steering the Human and Social Development programme within the CARICOM Secretariat for that decade, recalled the issues addressed at the Fourth meeting of the COHSOD in October 2000, and traced the growth and development of the Council to date.
Greene noted that the agenda of that
meeting had treated with issues such as building and sustaining a knowledge-based workforce; youth development; culture and development in the region and building on strengths to meet the challenges of social, economic and technological change.
Many of those issues had persisted, Dr Greene acknowledged, noting that the challenges of the decade had stymied the progress of some mandates.
However, he was confident that “whereas in 2000 we were launching some important initiatives; by 2010 we have delivered on almost all of them.”
CSME
Chief among the outputs Dr Greene outlined was establishing the mechanisms for movement of skills within the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
The CARICOM Passport which is now issued by nearly all 15 Member States in the Caribbean Community is another achievement that the COHSOD could boast.
The CXC success story is yet another and Dr Greene explained that the expansion of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) not only as the driver of secondary education, but also as the promoter of post-secondary education was another proud feat which the COHSOD had helped to facilitate.
Similarly, he singled out the introduction of the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ), as a bold step in promoting the movement of skilled workers within the CSME, and acknowledged the Caribbean Association of National Training Agencies (CANTA) for its role in this milestone.
Pointing to achievements in health, Dr Greene acknowledged the role that the COHSOD played in fighting chronic non-communicable diseases.
He mentioned the landmark Heads of Government Summit in 2007 in Trinidad and Tobago which spawned the Port-of-Spain Declaration on Chronic NCDs and explained that one of the 15 actionable points in that Declaration was the region-wide annual observance of Caribbean Wellness Day on the second Saturday of September.
Of utmost importance, he added, was the advocacy of COHSOD and other key stakeholders which led to the decision by the United Nations to convene a special session on NCDs at its General Assembly.
PANCAP
According to Dr Greene, one of the most vibrant institutions of the decade – the Pan-Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP) – which has been deemed an international best practice was coordinated within the CARICOM Secretariat.
In addition to PANCAP, he declared, other institutions attached to COHSOD had also contributed “in no small measure,” to the integration process through functional cooperation.
Among those were the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, the Caribbean Cooperation in Health (CCH) and the work of the five regional health institutions which would be soon merged into one umbrella body – the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA).
He added that the establishment of CARPHA would complete the 12-actionable points of the Nassau Declaration, and applauded the role of the outgoing CARICOM Secretary-General in helping to pilot several of those initiatives, singling out his role in fine-tuning the Nassau Declaration – The Health of the Region is the Wealth of the Region.
In moving forward, Dr Greene said, the COHSOD would continue to push for the implementation of the Declaration of Paramaribo on the Future of Youth in the Caribbean Community as well as other initiatives already in train, the release added.