Cabinet to review strategic plan to address Guyana’s labour shortage

A strategic plan to tackle the country’s labour shortage dilemma will soon be submitted to Cabinet for its review and guidance on implementation.

Head of the Diaspora Unit Rosalinda Rasul spoke recently of constant engagements with stakeholders on devising initiatives to resolve the issue.

Rasaul told the News Room that she met with Chief Labour Officer, Daneshwar Deonarine this week to discuss the draft labour shortage strategic plan.

“What I’ve done subsequently is create a model for how information can flow from all of the stakeholders,” Rasul said as she touted the idea of an Advisory Board.

Once presented and feedback is received from Cabinet, the Manpower Design and Strategic Unit will take the next steps towards implementation.

The Unit was established last September and it is expected to provide statistics on areas where more human capacity is needed. Based on a 2021 report from the International Office for Migration (IOM), Guyana needs at least 100,000 skilled personnel for its medium-term development.

Rasul said several areas such as maritime and the education sector have indicated labour is needed.

“The Minister [of Education] told us that they were looking for speech therapists those are people that we can we can begin to tap into, we [also] got requests about finding our source at skills within the music area for Guyana.

“We need captains, we need mates basically, of course engineers, and you don’t have quite a lot of that… but we need specialized skills to deal with those kinds of things,” Rasul said.

“Those are some of the collaborations that we have with the Ministry of Education, training and also finding or encouraging students to pursue new paths basically for some of the shortages that we have,” Rasul explained.