STEM Guyana is using the longest holiday of the school year to good effect by reaching into some of the far corners of Guyana in collaboration with various partner organisations to help prepare the country’s young people to become what, sooner rather than later, will be the highly sought after labour force needed to take the responsibilities of economic and social development forward.
The Stabroek Business has been tracking the work of STEMGuyana’s technology programme which is being rolled out in collaboration with the Office of the First Lady, the Department of Youth, the Ministry of Public Telecommunications, Specialists in Sustained Youth Development and Research (SSYDR), ExxonMobil, the Guyana Lands & Surveys Commission (GLSC), the Ministry of Social Protection and the Guyana Telephone & Telegraph Company (GTT).
In order to realise these partnerships, STEMGuyana was required to provide evidence of its ability to deliver. It has been able to conduct, often concurrently, more than 12 independent week-long STEM camps, multiple day-long workshops, 5 website development classes targeting 150 students in 5 of the country’s administrative regions and contribute to the execution of the Coily hair mobile app.
These partnership engagements apart, STEMGuyana has been directly involved in the ongoing preparation of the senior robotics team for the First Global Dubai competition in October 2019 for which the organisation also continues to raise funds.
The various technology-related programmes being conducted during the August 2019 holidays have, up until now, impacted more than 3000 young people in 9 administrative regions.
Up to this time, more than 25 young interns have been recruited trained and engaged by STEMGuyana to work on various projects. These engagements allowed STEMGuyana’s interns to benefit from starting stipends of $60,000 per month for a 25-hour work week.
Whilst STEM Guyana administrators say that the organisation’s August 2019 undertaking was an
ambitious one, it says, as well, that careful planning over the course of the past two years allowed the organisation to increase the capacity of its technical network across the country, an accomplishment which it says has paid dividends. The organisation, its co-founder Karen Abrams told Stabroek Business, was able to tap into the expertise of its former students, STEM club leaders and the Department of Youth’s volunteers, engaging young people had been trained and certified by STEMGuyana in robotics, scratch coding and website development.
“We are being both careful and deliberate about building an ongoing recruitment and training programme to create a national network of young people who possess those sought after technical and soft skills necessary to make them competitive in the future. Our training has to be ongoing since the young people we train are highly sought after by other technology companies in Guyana,” Abrams says.
Abrams says she believes that STEMGuyana has created a new technology industry in Guyana. “Companies are now offering robotics training for children, and Guyanese parents are beginning to understand what parents in developed countries already know, that is, that in addition to learning technology skills, programmes like those being offered by STEMGuyana encourage teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, communication and conflict resolution skills which will make their children globally competitive and marketable in the future, regardless of the career path they choose.
