Gov’t cuts spending on youth projects
GOVERNMENT has been pumping less money into youth programmes and is now moving to get maximum results from existing ones that have been reaping success.
“The truth of the matter is that the state, because of the fiscal crisis that it faces, has been spending less not just on youth programmes, but on all programmes,” said minister of education, youth and culture, Maxine Henry-Wilson.
She added that the economy needed to experience more significant growth in order for the government to spend additional resources on social services such as education.
Henry-Wilson was speaking on Thursday at a workshop organised by her ministry to identify priority actions for youth development. The seminar was held at the Madallion Hall Hotel in Kingston under the theme, “Translating Intentions into Actions”.
But despite the reduction in government spending, Henry-Wilson said education was still allocated a significant portion of the budget, after payment of debts.
“The ministry of education youth and culture has perhaps been given the largest bulk of new money in supplementary estimates. So there is more than a rhetorical commitment to ensuring that you have resources,” she told the workshop.
Meanwhile, she cautioned that there was no panacea for youth development but rather that there were best practices that have been used that were successful.
“We have had enough experiments with youths. We need to see what has worked and what has not,” she commented.
To this end, she stressed the need for the continuity and strengthening of successful youth programmes.
“I can guarantee you that the crisis that we face now in terms of youths cannot be solved within a year or two and what we need to do is to sustain what we have”.
She added that the country also needed to focus on two or three things: the first of which would be to get the youth to stay in school, in addition to getting schools to perform and selling the message about the value of education to young people.
“I think we need to level with our youths. A lot of the things that they do are not conducive to building a modern progressive society and we need to tell them that,” Henry-Wilson stressed.
“But we are afraid of saying these things because then it is said that you are against poor people. The things we do on behalf of poor people have brought them to where they are,” she continued, adding that poor people did not want patronage. “They want opportunity and development and we need to stop patronising them and understand the realities of life,” she said.
Affirming that education was a way of escaping poverty, Henry-Wilson added: “Our parents insisted that we go to school because they knew education was the only antidote to poverty. They experienced poverty and they saw it. So for us to be trying to fool people that being out of school is a good thing and that they can get a job afterwards, it does not work and we need to speak the truth to people.”