Guyana can learn more than a thing or two from the news that this year the government of sister Caribbean Community (Caricom) state Jamaica allocated J$12.8 million to a Craft Enhancement and Business Planning Training Project, which has been set up to improve and strengthen the capacity and business acumen of the country’s producers through increased quantity and diversity of their product offerings to meet, indeed exceed, the demand of the country’s tourist industry.
While the initiative is evidently designed by the Jamaican authorities to ensure high standards in the country’s craft industry as a sub-sector of the tourism sector, there are valuable lessons here for Guyana where the nexus between the craft sector and the fledgling tourism industry is more or less non-existent.
Interestingly, Jamaica has already set the project’s anticipated targets for the 2015/16 fiscal year which have to do with the training and certifying of artisans in the use of indigenous materials. The curriculum related to this goal includes training in the use of