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Fostering skills development - Harnessing the minds of the youth
Published in the Jamaica Gleaner: Sunday | August 12, 2007
Don Robotham, Contributor
The election campaign is now raging around us. In this heated atmosphere it is difficult to keep our minds focused on the long-term interests of Jamaica. The problem faced by our youth is one such case. Neither party seems willing to seriously address this issue.
When we raise the issue of our youth, we are, in fact, discussing our most pressing and deeply-rooted social problem. This is the problem of violent crime. Crime is essentially an expression of the crisis facing our male youth. About 80 per cent of all murders are committed by persons who belong to this group.
Youth rage
Generations of hardship have produced intense feelings of rage in our youth. This rage finds expression in popular music, drug and other criminality, senseless acts of violence, gang formation, political garrisons, the 'Don' phenomenon, as well as in the narcissistic abandon of dancehall and bling. But we should not deceive ourselves. Youth rage will not confine itself to these outlets forever - it never does. Eventually, it will spill over into political extremism. I keep warning my friends that we are in the pre-extremism phase at the moment. Therefore, we should take sleep and mark death. For the sake of the youth, as well as ourselves, we must filter out the political noise and try to focus on the youth crisis as a matter of urgency.
Notwithstanding the vital importance of mastering English as discussed last week (Public Affairs), this article focuses on a different, but related issue. The question before us is: To what extent can more meaningful skill certification be accomplished at the semi-skilled level, without significant improvement in the mastery of English? Are there ways to help our youth now, despite their severe weaknesses in literacy and numeracy?
Room for improvement
Any such skills development programme would of necessity be confined to the semi-skilled level.However, let us remember that 75 per cent of our employed labour force has no formal training whatsoever in the jobs which they are doing. This means that there is massive room for improvement, even if this improvement is only from the unskilled to the semi-skilled level.
Here, we come upon a key challenge, which is seldom discussed and is predictably absent from the educational sections of the manifestos of the political parties. This is the fact that there is very powerful resistance from the youth to further training. It is one of the commonest illusions in Jamaica, and many thoughtlessly repeat the cliché by rote, that all one has to do is to put up more skills development centres and the youth will come flocking. This is false. They will not and do not come. Regardless of what they may say, in practice, the youth - especially in the 20-29 age group - vote with their feet against skills development and all forms of further education.
Serious challenges
Talk to any Jamaican politician and they will regale you with endless examples of this sad reality. Dr. Omar Davies once gained some notoriety by identifying this fact in his usually blunt manner. Professor Trevor Munroe has told me of the serious challenges he has faced in this regard. On a recent radio programme with the JLP Spokesman on Education, Mr. Andrew Holness, he gave a poignant account of his special efforts to implement a HEART skills development programme for the youth in his constituency. After much hard work by himself and the HEART technocrats, a tailor-made programme was designed. He identified at least 200 youth who could benefit. Many youth (but especially their mothers!) expressed enthusiasm for this constructive initiative. But when the appointed day actually came, the youth were missing in action!
If we are to make any real progress in this field, we have to begin with acknowledging that this is the harsh reality out there.
We must, therefore, stop deluding ourselves with pious statements about 'providing marketable skills' to youth who, in reality, do not actually take up these opportunities when they are offered.
What are the causes of this lack of interest of the youth in work-related education? This, clearly, needs much careful research, but I attribute it to the legacy of stagnation. These attitudes mainly spring from two sources. The first has to do with the decades-long high youth unemployment rate based on the long-term stagnation of the Jamaican economy. The second source has to do with the bunching of youth who are employed in the low wage and insecure sectors of the labour market.
Higher unemployment
As recently as 1999, the average unemployment rate in the 14-24 age group was 33 per cent. Astonishingly, youth in this age group who had been so foolish as to acquire some secondary education, reported an even higher unemployment rate - 37 per cent.
Given these experiences, the youth concluded that work-related education was a fool's errand. Now that the economy is attracting significant investment and both semi-skilled, as well as skilled jobs are being generated, the legacy of economic stagnation has left us with these deeply-rooted anti-training attitudes. This is the heritage we have to combat.
These realities have led some to propose that the answer to youth resistance lies in the development of compulsory youth training programmes - usually with a semi-military slant. At one fell swoop, this would solve the skills as well as the discipline deficit, they think.
A mistake
But this would be a mistake. Such a programme is likely to be extremely controversial and to generate even more resistance. What is more, we do not have the money, under any scenario. For example, Lift Up Jamaica, when it was developed in 1999-2000, was costed at US$60 million for only 18 months - more than all the funds devoted to food stamps, indigence provision and school feeding combined. This large sum only provided for temporary employment for 40,000 youth in the 18-30 age group at the very modest wagelevel of J$2,500 per week. But there are 665,000 youth in the 15-29 age group. Most of us simply have no idea how costly large-scale social programmes are. Even if our debt was much lower, we could never finance it.
This is why I suggest that we should begin any expanded skills development programme with the employed, not the unemployed youth. Such youth are already in jobs and their motivation will be less difficult to stimulate. Our aim should be to extend the HEART competency training programme to these youth on a mass basis. I have in mind young mechanics, painters, carpenters, masons, steelworkers, and workers in other service sector jobs. I particularly have in mind, the youth who work in small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) who are, of course, the overwhelming majority of our employed labour force.
Purpose
The purpose of this competency training (without English) would be to raise skill levels and to give youth formal certification of their real achievements, even though this would only be at the semi-skilled level. This further training and formal certification would enable them to improve their competence and put the consumer and employer in a better position to get value for money. It would set the stage for these youths to claim higher wages, benefits and greater job security. This is not proposed as an alternative to a mastering English programme. Both are needed and would go hand in hand.
Fortunately, we can draw on the considerable international experience which is being accumulated in this very area. In Ghana, the World Bank had a very interesting skills development programme which has been evaluated as a success. At the successful conclusion of the course, the young Ghanaian workers were provided with a 'World Bank Certificate' of competence - which proved to be a powerful and prestigious incentive. There was also one in Kenya which seemed to have been plagued by corruption in the misuse of training vouchers. In Benin, in West Africa, the Swiss have financed what seems to be an effective programme of skills development in the informal sector. The key in all these programmes seems to be to prepare good teachers well in advance, NOT to use traditional craftsmen as teachers and to manage training vouchers carefully.
Obstacles
There are, of course, obstacles. Workers insist on being trained on employers' time. Most employers are small and could never be expected to bear the burden of skills development on their work time, on top of the many other miseries which they currently face. Some employers will see mass competency training as the thin edge of the wedge of formalisation - they will now have to cough up payments for NIS and NHT.
But all of these are problems which can be overcome. If we put a quarter of the energy that we put into electoral campaigns into tackling our real problems, we would be well on our way.
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