Policy must address youth issues

Any Human Resource Development Policy that you create for Barbados must address the various socio-economic issues that the young people face, such as high unemployment figures.

 

This was the advice that the Minister of Labour, Social Security and Human Resource Development, Senator Dr. the Honourable, Esther Byer Suckoo, sent out to human resources practitioners drawn from various organizations across the public and private sector, who were gathered at the Radisson Aquatica yesterday for the Breakfast Meeting to discuss the Draft National Human Resource Development Policy for Barbados.

 

This is necessary because there is a level of frustration where the youth do not see themselves attaining the kinds of things that their parents attained, she said.

 

“They don’t think that they can ever achieve what they have come up to know, the kind of homes and cars and jobs that they see around them, that they see their parents have; they don’t think that they can achieve that and this is not just Barbados. CARICOM did a survey and other surveys have been done across the world.”

 

In addition, there is also the fear that they may not even live to see their late 20s and 30s because they see and hear stories of young people around them dying young, usually from foul play.

 

“And with that the societal disruption that I have just referred to, …we have young people who now experience a level of violence that we probably didn’t know when we were growing up and what is even more worrying, is that in that survey and in other surveys like it, people are saying that they don’t expect that they would live to see 25 or live to see 29 or 35 and not because 29 and 35 seem old, because we know that when you are 17, 35 seems ancient, but they just don’t think that the ways things are going now, they would live to see that because they see so many other young people dying, usually violently at very early ages.

 

She continued: “So it is a sad state of affairs when our young people are saying to us that they don’t think that they can actually reach those kinds of numbers like 35, where we in Barbados pride ourselves as having the highest number of centenarians and every week we are celebrating a centenarian. This is what Barbados is about. But when our young people are saying, ‘no, I don’t think I can live to see 25 and if I do, I don’t know what quality of life I have’ and they used to say, ‘well, I probably would fare better if I left Barbados and went oversees’ and now, they are seeing that across the world it is no different. So we really are seeing a level of despair that we have to do something about.”

 

She therefore urged the HR professionals to keep this in mind during their discussions. “So as you deliberate and discuss what ought to be the main features of this new Human Resource Development Policy for Barbados, remember that our young people deserve to have expectations, they deserve to have dreams and we must create decent work and opportunities for prosperity among our youth before those expectations give way to hopelessness.”