The social environment created by those striving for political dominance does not allow for an authentic popular expression of national concerns for it cannot accommodate the kind of democratic participatory institutions that are necessary if such policies are to be found and fructify. Thus the PPP/C in the years after Cheddi Jagan did not care too much about the existence of a national youth policy and it is admirable that the APNU+AFC government has completed the project that has been so very long in the making. Youth policies are not ends in themselves and without extensive stakeholder participation to drive the process they remain parchment.
As of 2014, of the world’s 198 countries, 127 had national youth policies 131 had a national youth organisation and nearly all – 190 – had a national governmental authority responsible for youth, and yet the condition of youth remains very challenging. Youth policies can help keep the issues facing young people on the front burner but beyond that they have not been particularly transformative where the rights and aspirations of young people are concerned.
It appears to me that public policy should ideally be judged by the impact it makes on the poor and marginalised. The think tank, Youth Policy Labs, which focuses on youth policy issues, did in-depth reviews of the youth policy environment in a few countries to try to gauge their effect and found that ‘Almost all the country reports … emphasized the fact that vulnerable and marginalized youth groups, although identified in the policies as requiring special support, continued to be sidelined.
Certain youth groups were also marginalized due to a range of cultural and political issues such as language, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. Countries do not seem to have found effective means of integrating all youth groups into even existing programs’ (most of the quotes in this presentation can be found in documents at http://www.youthpolicy.org).
Youth policies may be as general or specific as one chooses and the one the government has now adopted is very general. The specifics we are promised will come in a National Youth Empowerment Action Plan. Education, training, employment, access to the labour market, health and youth civic involvement are key issues in all youth policies, and to be properly addressed these issues ‘call for coherent involvement of all stakeholders in the youth field and cross-sectoral collaboration through creation of linkages within other relevant national policy frameworks.’
In this rather complex institutional setting, it is widely recognised and I agree that organised youth participation in decision-making at the heart of the formulation and implementation process is vital if policies are to reflect youth priorities and be properly implemented. The Swaziland Youth Policy Labs report suggests that in the absence of this kind of involvement although the government ‘has put in place appropriate policies to address the needs of young people. … it would appear that these policies have not been effectively implemented, have not adequately addressed the specific needs of the young people or have not resulted in improved outcomes for young people.’
The Colombia report claims that ‘the absence of youth councils in the country has closed opportunities for youth to associate, debate, and campaign for youth issues. … (and so) there is a need to increase and strengthen mechanisms to promote youth participation in policymaking, however there is no agreement on how this should be achieved. … many youth leaders and organisations consider the opportunities for youth participation to be limited, especially in initiatives at the departmental and national levels.’
Guyana’s present youth policy speaks broadly of wanting youth to participate in decision-making and of recognising and supporting the establishment of representative institutions or groups of youth. However, the process began with a major shortcoming. During the debate on the policy in the National Assembly, the opposition PPP claimed that its youth arm, the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), which is arguably the most active and powerful national youth group in the country, was not consulted. Added to this, the critique made of the policy by the PPP/C which was given short shrift by the government. Given the political/ethnic nature of Guyana, what we have then is a ‘national’ youth policy only in name!
The truth is the political nature of Guyana has injected itself into the process and thus has significantly diminished any chance of success either without those in authority caring or recognising that this would have occurred. This must be the case for it is insufficient to tell us in a generalized manner that all youths were invited and that the PPP/C ‘has a very good record of absenting themselves from invited consultations.’ (‘House passes National Youth Policy:’ Chr. 14/10/2016). Had it been otherwise this reluctance to participate on the part of a major stakeholder such as the PYO would have been factored into the project design and an extensive effort and explanation available of what, out of the normal, had been done to bring the PYO on board.
One suspects that in Guyana’s charged political/ethnic situation, like the PPP/C before them, the present incumbents will charge ahead and they and their ethnic enclaves will then blame the resulting suboptimal results on the intransigence of the other side. Hopefully one is wrong and the government intends to do more than pay lip-service to stakeholders’ inclusion. If the youth policy is to be more than a charade the regime must be untiring in its effort to encourage and actualize the involvement of democratically elected national youth arrangements that will be able to properly, articulate, integrate and help to implement the priorities set by all Guyana’s young people.
