But what does it mean from day to day, to be a young citizen of this part of the world?
There are a lot of us; the youth population is peaking and will begin to decline in 2010. 16-29s make up a large part of the workforce: ranging from 27% in Bermuda (the lowest), to 57% in Jamaica, 60% in St. Lucia and beyond. Ours is the important job of generating adequate output to support a reasonable standard of living for a soon “ageing” Caribbean population as we go through the 21st century.
“No problem, man”?
But unemployment is rife. While there is a lot of variation across the region, most countries have around 40% unemployment or higher among the 15-19s and around 28% unemployment among the 20-24s. Of all the Caribbean’s unemployed, just over half are 15-24.
At present our economies are based on agriculture (St. Lucia, Dominica & St. Vincent), tourism (Anguilla, Bahamas, Jamaica) and financial services (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands & Turks & Caicos). All these industries are under some kind of pressure. Earnings from traditional sectors such as primary commodities continue their long-term decline. Caribbean countries have been undergoing a prolonged transition from being largely import protected and/or primary commodity producers to being liberalized economies.
That means countries have lost their preferential market access for bananas, sugar and garments for example – and are competing with other producers worldwide. Jamaica’s has been the longest experience of “structural adjustment,” stretching from the mid-1970s to 1996, and involving 18 agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Trinidad and Tobago began policy borrowing from the IMF and the World Bank in 1987. Guyana followed shortly afterwards, while Barbados sought assistance from the multilateral agencies at the turn of the 1990s. Dominica and Grenada also have undergone more “home grown” variants of structural adjustment. But in the meantime, concern over international crime has made OECD countries less happy with small states turning to financial services, while tourism from the United States has greatly suffered from the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001.
As part of the structural adjustment process, affected Caribbean governments have had to cut back on public sector employment and the provision of social services and support. One substantive result has been a worsening of poverty indicators across much of the region. In the larger Caribbean countries, an estimated one quarter to one third of the population is living below the poverty line.
Of course, structural adjustment is not solely responsible for our economic difficulties – and may yet, perhaps, produce some of the benefits promised. Over the decades, relying on protected primary industries may have held the development of the Caribbean back. Globalised markets are fierce, but they also portend opportunities. The question is, can those opportunities be seized within the kinds of policy frameworks we’ve seen in recent years?
Train for employment
Structural adjustment has not challenged existing inequalities. In the sugar producing countries, age-old class structures are still in place – and in some cases still along racial lines. Everyone is rightly concerned about the breakdown of the social fabric of Caribbean communities in the last ten years. What hasn’t broken down is differential access to educational opportunities, the job market and training, and most importantly, unequal participation in decision-making. The educated dominate the debate about how to organise education, their offspring get the best deal, and the cycle continues. Traditionally it has been trade unions that have challenged this state of affairs, through the likes of V. C. Bird Sr., Eric Williams, Robert L. Bradshaw and Eric Gairy.
Today, there is surely ever more reason for looking long and hard at these fractures in our societies. As globalisation proceeds, the accent on marketable skills as a precondition for employment is heightened. The manual jobs disappear, and the new jobs require language skills, IT skills, and many other hard earned “specialisms”. Where young people are excluded from skills acquisition today, it is when they need it most, and when their countries need it most. If there is one market above all that the state should intervene in, is the market in skills. And, returning to demographics, we have to guard against education and skills actually losing resources as the population ages.
Of course there are demand-side factors involved in joblessness in the Caribbean, we have mentioned a few. But the supply side factors are what we could and should be doing something about immediately. In 2001, studies of Jamaica, St. Vincent & The Grenadines and Dominica (by the Caribbean Youth Employment Dialogue Secretariat) found that there are significant deficiencies in training that explain the co-existence of unemployment and unfilled vacancies in certain areas. A 2001 Commission on Youth in the same islands found that education and training was lacking in terms of relevance to modern technology and multi-skilling.
An attitude problem?
The Commission also found that today’s young Caribbean citizens have very high occupational and wage aspirations, lack of work experience and inappropriate attitudes. Some would therefore jump to lay blame for unemployment at the feet of the youth themselves. But what shapes our attitudes? How do some 13-15 year-olds, classified as too young to receive employment training, fall out of school into that limbo? We can’t assume everyone has the guidance of their families. In one employment training programme, it was reported that sexual abuse by family members was experienced among 5-10% of the student intake. There was also a significant correlation between sexual abuse and the young people getting involved with drugs. These problems within the nuclear family are a result of the extinction of the extended family. The Caribbean used to know that it takes a village to raise a child, but this has been eroded by our becoming engrossed in accumulating material things: our focus on the individual prize has obscured the communal.
For all the talk of “male marginalization,” unemployment among young women is generally twice as high as among young men. Early pregnancy and discrimination are both factors. On the other hand, technological change and the economy’s shift toward the service sector is expected to lift women’s employment and earning beyond men’s in the late 20s age bracket. Women do seem to be seizing more opportunities for training – perhaps driven by the legacy of exclusion itself.
Bring youth centre-stage
Youth policy in the Caribbean has tended historically to be located within the Ministry of Education and hence part of the formal education system; or to be linked to the Ministry of Sport or Community Affairs. These Ministries do not benefit from large allocation of funds. In real terms spending on the education system has long been on the decline in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps, more recently, in Barbados. Moreover, youth policy, and particularly youth employment training policy, is often reactive, and informed by the desire to be able to report on large numbers of trainee intakes. The increase in youth crime has also precipitated “quick fix” solutions, many times targeting, in practice, young people who are outside the at-risk group. There is virtually no private sector assistance to youth at risk; with the exception of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce whose programmes are above the norm. A range of non-governmental organizations, particularly church-based groups have had a much longer and consistent involvement in youth programmes. However, they have always reached relatively few due to limited resources.
What a lot of us in National Youth Councils have been calling for is a Caribbean Youth Dialogue on youth employment: a regional Dialogue of leaders of national youth organisations. This would seek to improve knowledge of the youth employment situation – reliable and timely data is scarce – and forge partnerships in the civil society sphere to stimulate and inspire the development of programmes and policies in all Caribbean countries. The focus needs to be on access to quality education and training programmes, credit, and other resources needed to build productive and sustainable livelihoods. Among the objectives would be to
· Establish and support the work of the Youth Employment Networks;
· Lobby for national youth policies, national action plans for youth employment, national youth employment funds and other structures to address and implement the recommendations of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on youth employment;
· Harness the media to create public awareness and place the burning issue of youth unemployment on the global agenda;
· Foster friendships, and the exchange of information, cultural knowledge and understanding.
Political renewal
Why are education, training and employment so important? Looking beyond the workplace, none of our policy-making and institution-building processes can succeed if they permit a dwindling of human resources – the opportunities presented by Information Communications Technology (ICT), for one, will be missed. Our region will move forward only by pursuing the economic and social base; political will; adequate resource allocation and supportive legal and administrative frameworks for youth development; a stable environment of equality, peace and democracy; and a positive value system.
This is a job that is multi-faceted and requires the cross-fertilisation of ideas from every sector of society. The era of charismatic leaders has faded, leadership takes on new and complex forms, but our goal remains: “out of many, one people.” Let us commit ourselves to take up leadership roles in our societies – not tomorrow but today. The bat, as it is said, is in our hands, I trust that we will decide to stay at the crease and bat for time immemorial.
« return.