There are a few things about last week’s two-day working session on finalizing a national policy on youth empowerment that merit public comment. First, a forum of such importance ought to have benefited from far more prior media exposure than this one was afforded. Given the presumed magnitude of its importance it may well have attracted a far more generous measure of public attention if more information on the agenda, the participants, the key presenters and the anticipated outcomes had been made public earlier.
Youth empowerment has always been one of those ‘feel good’ attention getters to which our politicians are inclined to resort in their public pronouncements as a means of boosting their approval ratings. Afterwards, we find ourselves waiting forever for the actualization of the undertakings that derive from those public pronouncements. It has been no different with many of the various other national fora convened by government, the most recent one being the previous administration’s 2014 economic policy forum, the outcomes of which will now probably never be disclosed to the nation.
The second point about the youth empowerment forum has to do with whether its organizers were able to attract to the event a representative cross-section of the nation’s young people, assuming of course that part of the objective of the event was to allow young voices from across the nation to be heard on those issues that affect them and that ought to occupy places of prominence on a national youth agenda.
As for the undertaking given by Presidential Advisor Aubrey Norton that the initiative will now be taken to the community level so that the discourse can galvanize a far broader cross-section of young people, it should be borne in mind that previous experience of what government loosely describes as public consultation might well engender a healthy measure of public cynicism about this particular undertaking. Mr Norton, Minister Roopnaraine, et al, have in their hands an opportunity to do differently and, by extension, to demonstrate that the Granger administration is as good as its word about giving genuine effect to the concept of public consultations.
It will doubtless be recalled that the previous administration pursued its own policy on youth empowerment, sometimes with much fanfare; again, we need to be enlightened as to what we have to show for those investments. One recalls too the much-touted youth empowerment initiatives undertaken by the local Board of Industrial Training, the Youth Empowerment Group Guyana (YEGG) and the June 2003 Youth Empowerment Forum hosted by the Carter Center in Linden which, in the words of the Carter Center, was intended to better equip young people “to make inputs into government policy at the highest levels.” There is, surely, much wisdom in seeking to determine whether this latest initiative can benefit from such accomplishments as its predecessors would have realized.
Finally, one might ask whether the organizers of the forum plan to produce, at the end of the day, a coherent, well-documented strategy that helps to lay the foundation for the creation of a sound youth empowerment policy and, more to the point, if the political administration will be prepared to take that policy forward as a matter of urgency based on its merit.
These are altogether worthwhile questions, if only for the reason that some of the most urgent challenges – from our frighteningly escalating crime situation to our acute scarcity of skills for development – have to do with young people, in one way or another. In other words, these consultations on youth empowerment are not an assignment in which we can afford to under-perform; so that while the government is to be applauded for this early in its tenure making a gesture (the forum, at this stage, is really no more than a gesture) in the direction of ‘empowering’ young people, it needs to remind itself that the recent forum comes on the heels of previous state-sponsored initiatives on ‘youth empowerment’ on which considerable resources were expended and for which – as far as this newspaper is aware – there is little if anything to show.
A national policy on youth empowerment is nothing if it is not – in the first instance – an initiative that seeks to identify and put in place measures to improve the social, intellectual and material well being of the nation’s young people. In that context the present undertaking will benefit from the active involvement of several state and non state institutions and of young people from communities across the country.
Much can be done to empower our young people, if, for example, we can invest in the creation of enhanced sport and recreational facilities at the community level, and a much enhanced education system that begins with the home as an incubator and extends all the way to university and beyond. There exists an unquestionable nexus between the chronic weaknesses in our education system and our protracted failure to produce skilled workers for the various sectors. Perhaps, equally disturbing, is what is widely believed to be the link between our unschooled and idle youngsters and a crime rate that has become one of the foremost national headaches.
Youth empowerment is also likely to be enhanced in circumstances where there is greater emphasis on extra-curricular pursuits in the areas of skills training supported by private sector attachments for young people, attendant job-creation programmes and cultural awareness pursuits.
Over time and setting aside the creation of the Guyana National Service, we have done little more than tinker with the notion of youth empowerment. The legacy of official indifference has been dysfunctional homes and communities, a host of early school dropouts, undereducated and directionless young people who are inadequately trained to meet our skills needs and many of whom have opted to resort to crime, sexual abuse of unempowered young men and women and early parenthood, among other challenges.
This latest youth empowerment initiative need hardly seek to re-invent the wheel. There already exists a considerable body of experience on which to draw and we are at a juncture where we simply cannot afford yet another investment in a wasted effort and resources.
