Dear Editor,
The newly installed Chancellor of the University of Guyana, in speaking at the recent dinner hosted by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was reported to have invited the private sector to contribute (substantially) more to education, and the University of Guyana in particular, which provided a good proportion of the skills and competencies the sector utilises.
This observation, even though not novel, should have particular resonance at this juncture in the economic development of Guyana.
The Chancellor did not need to expand on the reminder that many Guyanese (including Chamber members) graduated from overseas universities to which their own community and related business institutions contributed heavily, with a view to assuring that the skills they respectively needed were in adequate supply.
Locally the same principle has long been observed by such large employers as sugar and bauxite, and others in perhaps more modest terms, to the extent, at one stage, of investing in trade union education.
The point is that late as it is, the time has come for a major revival across the manufacturing, agricultural, services and other productive sectors, to contribute meaningful resources – human, material and financial – to the University of Guyana and other tertiary institutions struggling valiantly to supply the professional and sub-professional skills which all stakeholders admit are scarce but necessary.
Not long ago there was a national acknowledgement that our engines of development were being constrained by the brain or skills drain. However, there has since been no similar pronouncement on the efficacy or otherwise of the strategy or strategies devised to address the acknowledged chronic deficits.
There is hardly a strategic or ‘turnaround’ plan, however carefully crafted, that does not re-emphasise the relevant human resources deficit existing. So in the absence of any institutional or sector declaration, the impression is given that the captains of industry and commerce are just waiting for a change in the weather to hoist varying sails even while in the same boat.
One finds it difficult to reconcile this fundamental inertia with talk of competitiveness, and the inherent failure to address competitiveness not as an internal situation, but as one immediately relating to the CSME, and sooner than later, to South American economies.
This inertia is also perceived in the reluctance to share information that will strengthen each other’s vulnerabilities – so unlike the openness characterized, for example, in the publication Contact by the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce. It is no coincidence that Vol. 9 No. 3 2009 of the Contact’s cover highlights ‘Education: The Making of an Industry.’
The following is only a sampling of the topics dealt with in the magazine:
§ Diversify The Economy Through Education
§ Chamber Maps Roads to Economic Diversification
§ Building an Education Cluster in T&T
§ Accreditation: A Prerequisite for the Education Cluster; and most fittingly
§ Towards a Strategic Partnership between Academic and the Private Sector
There are at least a dozen other relevant topics.
In Guyana as a contrast, consultants will attest to the increasing difficulty in garnering responses for a normal compensation market survey, guaranteed to be confidential and at the same time to provide information that would be beneficial to the respondent institutions. Either it is that ‘confidentiality’ has degenerated into ‘secrecy,’ or that the former is reflective of a misconfidence in the specific structures and policies obtaining in these institutions.
What emerges from the overall content of Contact on the other hand, is the sense of self-confidence to take initiatives, to lead from the front in making the business environment into one that could generate productive partnerships, attract investors, and create a climate of promise of careers which will ultimately all culminate in growth.
So that to return to the Chancellor’s remarks, it would not be enough to invest in education and training. It would be equally, if not more critical, for businesses to be seen as good employers who can be relied upon to implement transparent systems of recruitment, promotion and related performance rewards; and who will break out of the perceived tunnel of patronage and partisanship, and raise a platform of real corporate social responsibility, amongst the objectives of which must be equal opportunity to innovate, to be respected as part of the decision-making process; and finally to provide the much needed competitive edge to our organisations and, in a manner, some stability to the society as a whole, by staying the course.
Those corporate citizens who may be prone to retreat to the justification of ‘return on investment’ may well be reminded of their intensive competition with their counterparts to invest in sports. Some can easily boast about the sales volumes of their products generated by their sponsorships. What, however, cannot be identified is an individual or collective strategic plan to promote a single world-class sports contender.
One would be foolish not to support sportsmen and women and teams bereft of any other form of maintenance, but that some have had to forego participation to eke out an education for which no comparable support was forthcoming, reflects the lack of vision of both the corporate community and public administrators. On the other hand, the record tends towards self-dependent successes being exploited as sponsors of particular products and services.
So that even in sports there is no articulated strategy committing to substantive and sustained development, profitable in the short term as the financial investment would be.
In the final analysis when it comes to human resources development the cumulative image projected of the private sector is one of inertia, introversion and inconsistency.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
