Nadaleen Singh

An econ­o­mist has rec­om­mend­ed that the cur­ricu­lum at the pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary and ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion lev­els be al­tered to ac­com­mo­date in­no­va­tion.In­dera Sage­wan-Al­li, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Cen­tre for Com­pet­i­tive­ness, is how­ev­er cau­tion­ing against mak­ing changes in an iso­lat­ed man­ner.She said a goal must first be iden­ti­fied so that the cur­ricu­lum can be al­tered to achieve that goal.

In the keynote ad­dress at the me­dia launch of Glob­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship Week at the Sir Frank Chap­man Hos­pi­tal­i­ty Suite, Queen's Park Oval, yes­ter­day, Sage­wan-Al­li was crit­i­cal of T&T's ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem."If we want a dif­fer­ent ex­pec­ta­tion from our grad­u­ates then I say we have to set the re­quired goals at the out­set," she said.

"To il­lus­trate, you can­not train per­sons to find a job in the labour mar­ket and at the end of the train­ing, say go forth be cre­ative be in­no­v­a­tive, be an en­tre­pre­neur, start a busi­ness, when the train­ing he re­ceived did not pre­pare him for such ac­tion."Sage­wan-Al­li said there is need to teach so­ci­ety how to take risks in a man­aged way, since we are not all nat­ur­al risk tak­ers.

She ex­plained: "Of the to­tal SMEs in T&T 75 per cent are mi­cro en­ter­pris­es. Un­for­tu­nate­ly we are not do­ing enough to grow this im­por­tant busi­ness sec­tor."In T&T on­ly 11 per cent of MSME's start up fund­ing comes from the bank­ing sec­tor, 70 per cent comes from per­son­al sav­ings."She said the high in­ter­est rates of­fered by banks and fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions pre­vents some start-ups from get­ting fi­nanc­ing for their busi­ness­es.

Ad­min­is­tra­tion af­ter ad­min­is­tra­tion has come and gone and none has put enough mea­sures in place to stim­u­late in­no­va­tion, she said, adding that there has been no in­ter­ven­tion even as the Cari­com lev­el.

Quot­ing from a UWI econ­o­mist Sage­wan-Al­li said: "Cour­tesy state in­ter­ven­tion in the labour mar­ket, we boast of an of­fi­cial un­em­ploy­ment rate in T&T of ap­prox­i­mate­ly four per cent, notwith­stand­ing youth un­em­ploy­ment and un­der em­ploy­ment is clos­er to 20 per cent and fe­male un­em­ploy­ment even high­er.

"Of the 6000-plus per­sons in the labour force, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200,000 are em­ployed in gov­ern­ment make work pro­grammes. In Cepep and URP alone 100,000 per­sons."She blamed the for­tunes of oil and gas for the labour sit­u­a­tion T&T now faces.

"I am be­moan­ing those who we put to gov­ern on our be­half to put us on a path of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment who have failed to use the re­sources to do so," she said.