Minister warns of growing crisis as Govt launches regional skills initiative

Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­[email protected]

Warn­ing that too many young men are falling be­hind in ed­u­ca­tion, em­ploy­ment and train­ing, Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing, Prakash Per­sad, yes­ter­day de­scribed the is­sue as a grow­ing so­cial cri­sis.

He said the Gov­ern­ment’s new Tech­ni­cal and Vo­ca­tion­al Ed­u­ca­tion and Train­ing (TVET) In­dus­try Con­nec­tion Labs and In­cen­tive Pro­gramme must di­rect­ly tar­get strug­gling young males across Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean.

“Young males are not do­ing well. They are the ones who seem to be in some de­gree of dis­tress,” Per­sad said at the launch of the re­gion­al ini­tia­tive at the Youth Train­ing and Em­ploy­ment Part­ner­ship Pro­gramme’s (YTEPP) Ch­agua­nas head­quar­ters.

Per­sad said while women and mar­gin­alised groups re­main im­por­tant pri­or­i­ties, more at­ten­tion must be placed on young men who are in­creas­ing­ly dis­con­nect­ed from em­ploy­ment, ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.He said the ini­tia­tive was de­signed to cre­ate new path­ways through ap­pren­tice­ships, en­tre­pre­neur­ship pro­grammes, dig­i­tal learn­ing plat­forms and mi­cro-cre­den­tial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

“This ini­tia­tive demon­strates the pow­er of strate­gic re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion and in­ter­na­tion­al co­op­er­a­tion in ad­dress­ing shared de­vel­op­ment pri­or­i­ties,” Per­sad said.

“The fu­ture com­pet­i­tive­ness of Caribbean economies de­pends heav­i­ly on how ef­fec­tive­ly we in­vest in hu­man cap­i­tal, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and in­clu­sive work­force de­vel­op­ment.”

The pro­gramme in­volves part­ner­ships with the Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at, the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Train­ing Agen­cies, Brazil’s ABC and SENAI agen­cies, the Eu­ro­pean Union and Ger­man tech­ni­cal co­op­er­a­tion part­ners.

Per­sad said T&T was se­lect­ed as one of the pi­lot coun­tries for the ini­tia­tive, which seeks to mod­ernise TVET sys­tems across the Caribbean while strength­en­ing links be­tween em­ploy­ers, com­mu­ni­ties and train­ing in­sti­tu­tions. He said the min­istry will lead the ini­tia­tive through the Na­tion­al Train­ing Agency and the YTEPP.

He al­so an­nounced plans to ex­pand mi­cro-cre­den­tial pro­grammes to help cit­i­zens with­out for­mal qual­i­fi­ca­tions gain en­try in­to train­ing and em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“We don’t want to low­er the bar. We want to raise peo­ple up to reach the bar,” he said.

He stressed that Gov­ern­ment is al­so shift­ing TVET pro­grammes to­ward en­tre­pre­neur­ship and self-em­ploy­ment.

“The idea is not just to train peo­ple to look for jobs,” he said.

“The idea is that self-em­ploy­ment and en­tre­pre­neur­ship be­come a crit­i­cal part of the process.”

Per­sad added that Gov­ern­ment’s wider hu­man cap­i­tal de­vel­op­ment agen­da un­der Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, is aimed at en­sur­ing vul­ner­a­ble and un­der­served com­mu­ni­ties are not left be­hind in na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

“Na­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion can­not oc­cur with­out hu­man de­vel­op­ment. Eco­nom­ic growth can­not oc­cur with­out skills, and so­cial progress can­not oc­cur when sec­tions of so­ci­ety re­main ex­clud­ed from op­por­tu­ni­ty,” Per­sad said.