Oil and gas and strengthening of education sector
As we report in this issue of the Stabroek Business preparations for the materialization of ‘first oil’ in 2020 are witnessing the emergence of local learning institutions as partners in the process of training Guyanese to take up positions alongside their foreign counterparts in the high-skills oil recovery sector.
Our story makes specific reference to five local institutions, namely, the University of Guyana, the Government Technical Institute, the Guyana Sugar Corporation Training Centre, the MATPAL Marine Institute and TOTALTEC Oilfield Services. All of these are likely to see their own respective images enhanced through their supporting role in enabling the higher-level training of Guyanese to work on the oil and gas sector. Such collaboration is almost certain to see our local training institutions ‘rubbing shoulders’ with external entities of global repute in initiatives that will not only redound to the benefit of ‘first oil’ pursuits and to the overall oil-recovery effort; inevitably, that collaboration will expose the institutions themselves to opportunities for capacitybuilding through extended bilateral agreements with their foreign partners. The impact of these developments will be, we hope, a raising of standards at our local institutions since, going forward, they will be required to keep pace with the training requirements of an oil and gas sector that will be around well into the foreseeable future.
It is an opportunity that promises to bring with it not only a significant local and international enhancement of the profiles of these institutions but also to increase their worth as institutions of higher technical learning, conceivably reducing the ‘demand’ for training options elsewhere in the region and further afield. What, logically, ought to emerge in the immediate future is an official recognition of the role that these (and other) local institutions are set to play in the furtherance of Guyana’s development and an attendant policydirected significant investment in the growth of these institutions.
Setting aside the need to abandon the ‘policy’ of under-resourcing that has forever plagued these institutions, it is now clearly necessary for us to broaden the scope of their delivery capabilities so that they are able to offer tuition in an expanded range of relevant disciplines that have a direct bearing on the preparation of Guyanese to take up important positions in the oil and gas sector.
One expects, for example, that the Government of Guyana will look at the ‘resetting’ of its education focus to embrace the new economic realities and that this will include deliberate efforts to attract international attention to our local institutions and their needs bearing in mind the presence here of a number of globally recognized firms working in our oil and gas sector. Contextually, the domestic Local Content lobby must begin to pay attention to the importance of skills development for Guyanese in order to further increase the benefits accruing to Guyana from an oil and gas sector. The reality is that it will require a robust and persistent local lobby to turn opportunity into reality, particularly in the context of the much broader range of career-related professional avenues that have now opened up to younger Guyanese.
In all of this there is need to ensure that ExxonMobil and the various other players in our oil and gas sector play a meaningful role in the process of building those institutions which, even at this early stage, are already playing an important role in raising our profile in the process of oil recovery.
If there is, evidently, much validity in the current national discourses relating to satisfactory contractual arrangements, including just how the ‘spoils’ from the recovered oil are to be allocated, there is need to ensure that that does not become all of the agenda and that from a Guyana perspective we begin to strategize about just how our education system can be one of the primary beneficiaries from our new-found resource.