High levels of unemployment in the formal sector have long been steering new generations of job-seekers in alternative directions which, even up to a decade or so ago, would probably not have been on their radars. What is significant about this development is that the option to depart from the accustomed job choices is being embraced, increasingly, significantly, by young women, recent school-leavers, who appear to have put behind them the prospect of what we in Guyana have come to see as the respectable but all too frequently dead-end clerical employment options that offer only modest financial rewards.
At 18, Damacia Benn, a former student of St. John’s College, has just completed an agro-processing course at the Guyana School of Agriculture. What it has done for her, above everything else, she says, is to broaden the base of her ambitions beyond what is perhaps typically expected of a young female adult on the threshold of ‘graduating’ into the world of work, post-secondary studies or both. And over time, the likelihood of pursuing a business of her own has been, increasingly, dawning upon her.