Actions Areas
Brain Gain

 

Building a Brighter Future for Guyana: Creating the “Brain Gain”
Join innovators who are developing new approaches to attract the boldest and brightest skilled workers – from Guyana and the world. Web based outreach & recruitment, strategic skills targeting, new GoG initiatives and a National Pride in Guyana Campaign are becoming realities. You can help!

1. Focus of the Action Team
Guyana has been losing skills rapidly in recent years and is ranked second as the country suffering the highest level of skill loss in the region, after Suriname. An IMF study showed that 86% of degreed Guyanese emigrate. The National Competitiveness Strategy offers an opportunity for the public and private sector to come up with strategies to address the human resources needs of Guyana in a tangible and meaningful way.

The Action Team was tasked with coming up with a set of initiatives which could over the next six months see the formation of policies to create a pool of skilled resources to develop Guyana and champions of these initiatives were to be identified.

2. Main Themes and Strategies Addressed
Minister of Education, Henry Jeffrey and businessman, Clifford Reis addressed the action team on the possible solutions they saw. Jeffrey spoke of the need for a labour market/manpower study which looks at the gap analysis between what are the skill requirements of strategic growth industries and gearing the education and technical and vocational systems to produce these. Reis spoke of the need for companies offering training to their staff to collaborate instead of compete for skills; for incentives to be provided to graduates and for international and regional initiatives to provide for the awarding of contracts to Guyanese businesses. Harnessing technology to make use of the internet and established job sites to find skills, creating a virtual labour pool; changing immigration requirements to make citizenship easy and improving on CSME tract of a free movement of skills to attract skills from outside of the region; building pride in
Guyanese to stop bad mouthing Guyana and to market the positive values of living in Guyana; exploring incentives to retain and attract skills, including the reinstitution of a market supplement for key and critical skills, and improving the entrepreneurial training programme by having established businessmen address certain modules were all explored.

3. Key Initiatives Identified

Initiative	Leaders of the Initiative
Skill Gap analysis to create a data base	Minister Dale Bisnauth
Immigration Law change	To be determined
Web based recruiting	Minister Henry Jeffrey
Short term retention programme	Mark Bynoe
Incentivising graduates	Mark Bynoe
Entrepreneurial training	Sattaur Gafoor

4. Summary of Next Steps for Action Team
To be decided.

5. Leadership Team

Private	Public	Facilitators
Clifford Reis Ramesh Dookhoo	Minister Henry Jeffrey	Gitanjali Singh Joanna Homer

Action Initiatives (317 KB)