Dear Editor,
Some two years or so ago I forwarded to one of the local private sector organisations a copy of a magazine called Contact, produced by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Trinidad & Tobago.
That particular quarterly issue was almost completely dedicated to reporting on the range of productive interactions that had been coordinated with the various components of the education system in that country. The T&T Chamber of Commerce and Industry took the proactive approach towards ensuring that employers were provided with the requisite levels and quantum of skills to be utilised in their production and services sectors. The interactions therefore sought to forge a most creative series of partnerships with the appropriate levels and types of education institutions to develop, along with others, identified areas of regular skills; advanced technologies; professional competencies; in addition to upgrading relevant management capabilities.
In some areas of training and development individual members of the business world would be active contributors, while companies were committed to accommodating selected potential for growth to undertake complementary work attachments or internships.
All accepted the principle that while economic and social development may start with investment, it could only be sustained by suitably qualified employees operating optimally in every productive institution.
In Guyana the local private sector has taken at least two initiatives that may have escaped attention, even though one was the fairly well publicised engagement with the last Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana in which the parties examined opportunities they could jointly explore for the ultimate production of a more desirable standard of graduates.
The other, perhaps less noticeable, effort was the announced intention to conduct a survey of skills needed in relevant local enterprises, the results of which will certainly be critically important to the coordination of any strategy designed jointly with the Ministry of Education, the Board of Industrial Training and tertiary learning institutions, including those which fall outside the direct purview of the MoE, like the Georgetown Technical Institute.
When one observes the areas in which substantial investment is rapidly being made, eg exploration, participating businesses may wish to partner the GGMC as one example, in funding appropriate education and developmental programmes at UG and other identified institutions elsewhere.
That is not to say that in the meantime, some companies may not take a leaf out of Demerara Distillers’ book and try to be self-sufficient in supplying the prevalent skills gaps – a response pioneered more than a half-century ago by the sugar and bauxite industries – to their outstanding advantage.
Meanwhile, in Guyana there now happens to be an exceptional challenge to the private sector’s concerted capacity to create a realistic development plan for a community such as Linden. It is possible that the success or otherwise of a project developed and implemented with specific aims and objectives, may well provide lessons to be learnt, at the same time affording relevant experience which can inform further complementary initiatives in, and linkages with, other sections of the economic map.
As we speak the historic sugar industry is one critical area which, reasonably, should have invited active attention of, at least, those businesses (large and small) who must interact with it (and profitably).
One would have thought therefore that recognition of sugar’s waning fortunes and its negative impact on these individual economies, would cause a stir of apprehension and lead to some explicit initiatives to save the national patrimony.
Surely these business growers must recognise themselves as involved in the problem, and are therefore duty-bound to share, if not lead, in its recovery.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
