In more ways than one the international community has been ‘caught out’ by the advent of the coronavirus. Arguably its most inhibiting feature is the constraints that it has placed on direct human interaction, the imperative of social distancing placing restraints on human interaction that have impacted powerfully on our accustomed way of life.
The impact of being forced out of our comfort zone has been severest in poor countries where, as we have been discovering, finding ways of circumventing conventional channels of communication depends on access to technological tools to which poor countries have only very limited access, in some instances, or none at all.
The effects have been felt, mostly, in the area of education, where the tried and tested conventional classroom tuition has been torn to shreds by the requirement of social distancing and where the strictly limited technological resources of a country like Guyana have left our education system in a condition of deep crisis from which, for all the stop-gap measures that have been put in place, there is no immediate-term recovery in sight.
In other critical spheres of our existence too, our inability to readily and comfortably engage each other on a face-to-face business continues to hamper other activities that are key to our development focus. What this has meant is that apart from the responsibilities associated with protecting our physical selves against the pandemic, we also are challenged to ensure that we protect those systems that sustain us as a human community.
As has already been mentioned, nowhere has this limitation been more exposed than in the education sector where emergency social distancing measures suddenly and with little warning compelled the dispersal of the conventional system leaving us, for several months, still struggling to find a mechanism to compensate for what we have lost. As this editorial is being written our countrywide Grade Seven aspirants, having braved the menace of COVID-19 to get through their Grade Six examinations still appear to have no early hope of turning out in their new uniforms, sitting next to new classmates and commencing the next new phase of their education. Instead, our children are beginning their exposure to a ‘new normal’ as far as education delivery is concerned.
As the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) so ably demonstrated on Wednesday we cannot allow our development agenda to become permanently hamstrung by COVID-19. Over a considerable period of time the GMSA worked with various local and international organizations to hammer out the logistical and technological ramifications of bringing a group of people together, virtually, from inside and outside Guyana, it is an initiative designed to probe and hopefully find solutions to challenges that have arisen in areas that are critical to Guyana’s longer-term future. From reports reaching this newspaper the outcomes, in terms of an enabling interaction between and amongst the participants on ways in which those challenges can be addressed were a credit to the effort of the GMSA and its partners in the initiative. We owe the GMSA and its partners a debt of gratitude.a