Government is working on a number of mechanisms to help foster job creation, President David Granger said yesterday, while reiterating that a solid education remains crucial for employment.
“We feel that if you can keep children in school, they will emerge literate, they will emerge numerate and it will be easier for us to employ them. There is no point going out and promising people jobs when they do not have the skills or the education level to support the jobs that we want to provide,” Granger told reporters at his first press conference since he took office in May.
Granger repeatedly stressed the importance of education to the development of the country.
During the lead up to the polls, the APNU+AFC alliance had promised that if it gets into power lots of emphasis will be placed on creating jobs for young people.
“Our mechanism is to get more children to remain in school. As you know, we have a very high rate of dropouts, it’s about 500 a month…” he said yesterday, before adding that government has embarked on the Every Child in School (ECIS) programme.
He was responding to a question on some of the mechanisms that will be put in place to create jobs.
“That is one of the reasons why we have been providing school buses, bicycles and boats… to keep children in schools. If people can’t afford transportation, we will find means of helping them to get to school,” he added.
Another mechanism, he said, is to encourage young school dropouts, and particularly those living in the hinterland, to get back into youth employment programmes so that they can learn useful skills that will be useful in their communities. He said sometime these indigenous young people would be brought to the city to do skills training in electrical wiring but this is not useful as in their communities there are not much wiring to be done. “We want to give them more appropriate skills,” he said, before adding the Ministry of Indigenous People’s Affairs will be re-launching the Youth Entrepreneurship and Apprenticeship Programme (YEAP) in order to get young people to learn skills which will guarantee them employment in their communities.
He said many young people in the hinterland areas, after leaving school, drift into the gold fields and across the border to Brazil or Venezuela. “We feel we can keep them in their communities if we provide facilities for agro processing that is allowing them to use their farm produce…to process it so they start selling peanut butter and cassava bread rather than raw cassava,” he said.
Granger stressed that “these are the means that we hope to employ to create jobs. We have to start by keeping young people in school.”
He spoke of replacing the former administration’s $10,000 education cash grant voucher with an alternative that rewards parents who keep their children in school. “We intend to actually reward parents for keeping their children in school… parents who keep their children out of school actually break the law. So will try to encourage parents, we don’t want to put anybody in jail,” he said, while adding that in years to come this could result in a more literate population, which could be better employed in developmental projects.
On the question of raising teachers’ salaries, which was one of the elections campaign promises, he said that is being looked at by the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service. He informed that the commission “is now receiving memoranda and representations from all public servants, including teachers and at the end of it you will see a ruling which will include nurses, teachers and all other branches of the public service.”
