Labour Minister urges BV, LBI residents to take advantage of Gov’t scholarships

Minister of Labour, Hon. Joseph Hamilton has urged the residents of Beterverwagting and La Bonne Intention, East Coast Demerara to take advantage of the Government of Guyana’s 20,000 online scholarships programme.

The Minister was at the time conducting an outreach in those villages on Friday where he engaged residents at the Beterverwagting Secondary School and the LBI Cricket Ground, respectively.

Minister Hamilton said the scholarships programme which is being administered through the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL), offers great opportunities for citizens to access high quality training and education at six international universities, from the comfort of their homes.

“There are many persons, some might be in this audience, who wanted to go to university but they could not because they are working and the programme they want to do, all the classes are daytime and therefore they couldn’t attend the University of Guyana.

We are attempting to ensure that you can get a university education sitting in your living room and qualifying yourself.”

Minister Hamilton said the Government’s policy is that every citizen must have access to quality education, and as such, the administration has embarked on a countrywide outreach to introduce the programme to the people.  

“Our position is this, any policy we articulated, any policy we put out there to the public we always want to put ourselves in a position where we can be interrogated about the policy.

So that, we don’t want to put to the Guyanese people any faceless policy and that is why I am here,” he said.

Over the past week, Minister Hamilton along with Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Hon. Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, and Minister of Tourism Industry and Commerce, Hon. Oneidge Walrond have been engaging East Coast residents on the scholarships.  These activities will wrap up on Saturday.

The scholarship programme is being rolled out through a partnership between the Ministries of Education and Public Service. Over 3,500 applications are currently being processed by GOAL. These applications reflect both online and hard copy submissions from across the ten administrative regions for 108 programmes.