Georgetown : Minister within the Ministry of Education, Nicolette Henry criticised the Caribbean Community and Common Market’s pace of implementing processes, even as she reaffirmed Guyana’s commitment to working with the regional body towards a firm Caribbean future, full of “boundless possibilities.”
The Minister was at the time addressing the opening ceremony for the Twenty-Ninth Meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) held at the Secretariat’s Headquarters, at Liliendaal.
CARICOM’s Secretary General, Ambassador Irwin LaRocque, Assistant Secretary General, Human and Social Development, Dr. Douglas Slater,CARICOM Youth Ambassador, Belize Tarun Butcher, and Minister for Youth Development and Sports, Saint Lucia, Shawn Edwards were in attendance.
The session saw the CARICOM Ministers and officials, discussing issues in relation to youth and culture. Minister Henry opined that when it comes to the core issues that are up for discussion during the two-days, the region has come very far, but frankly has made little process.
“We have gathered here today to discuss the CARICOM youth development plan, an idea that arguably has its genesis coming out of the first meeting of the Directors of Youth and Directors of Sports here in Georgetown, almost 17 years ago,” the Minister pointed out.
She noted that CARICOM has been stressing the need for the development of creative industries, at least since 2003, in spite of recognising the critical role of culture and the need for a regional vehicle since the establishment of CARIFESTA in 1972.
“This is a paradox of CARICOM progression,” Minister Henry said. She added that this is severely impacted by the regional body’s perennial relative scarcity of resources, ingenuity and in some cases, statistics.
“Perhaps this is the forum at which we have finally brought together the two most critical pieces of the puzzle for sustainable regional integration and development, and that is youth and culture. Perhaps this is what we need to start with to truly ‘vigour’ the process in the first place,” she pointed out.
“Indeed more than most places, culture can and will play an invaluable role in fostering social cohesion and can provide the answer to our stymied development here whilst the creative and cultural industries can certainly offer exciting new avenues for the diversification of our economy,” the Minister said.
In reaffirming Guyana’s commitment to CARICOM, Minister Henry said that over the next 10 years, Guyana could provide the requisite leadership in regional cultural development policy and development.
She made this case based on three reasons; Guyana being a vanguard of the regional integration movement from the inception, Guyana stands at the nexus of three critical regional integration cooperation processes – CARICOM, Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and MERCOSUR, and because Guyana recognises that culture and the creative industry are critical for national development.
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