 St. Lucia's level of productivity and competitiveness is this week being thoroughly examined as the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council hosts the annual Productivity Awareness Week. Governments deliberate decisions to integrate the youth into the fabric of the local economy through the creation of the Department of Youth Economy, served as the catalyst for a deep dive into how young persons can be empowered and drive the economy. The National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, NCPC, cognizant of the importance of youth and its contribution to the development of St. Lucia, continued its observance of productivity awareness week, with a panel discussion aimed at exploring the topic, a strong youth economy as a catalyst for economic growth and national development. To accomplish this, however, Founder and President of the Youth Development and Empowerment Program, Anya Charles, said there are a number of hurdles that must firstly be overcome. Some of the challenges and limitations that our youth face, I believe, start from school. Not everyone is academically inclined, and schools offer conventional academia. But we do not focus on individuals with different skill sets. And this is by no means to say that the curriculum schools offer, it's not important. I'm not saying that at all. What I believe must happen or should happen, schools should determine skill sets outside of the conventional academia. We need to be able to nurture our young people's passions and dreams, and I think it's a question we need to ask ourselves. How do we nurture creativity from schools? Another limitation our young people face would be access to capital. Those who are leaving school and all they have with them are dreams. It is difficult for our young people to get access to capital to leave out those dreams. I also think lack of opportunity and lack of information. Again, not everyone is afforded the opportunity or the access to internet or networking. And overall, speaking of the right people, it's important that we need to educate our young people on the difference between limited liability and LLCs and overall legally registering their brand. Treasure of the St. Lucia National Youth Council, Steffi Alfred highlighted areas of priority for the youth economy. She noted that the youth economy is vast and should not be limited to entrepreneurship, but should be approached with a more encompassing strategy. One of the areas, because again, in my view, I don't think the youth economy is solely entrepreneurship. So entrepreneurship as a sector, entrepreneurship as a space where we are now developing young people. Financial literacy is a serious issue among St. Lucia and among people, generally. So when you look at financial literacy among young people, it's even a more serious situation. Our young people do not understand the importance of record keeping. Our young people do not understand the importance of filing taxes. Our young people are not taught. They're told, they're told, hey, you need to, you need to become an entrepreneur because we don't have jobs for you. You need to become an entrepreneur. But are they trained? No. So I think in all the development of entrepreneurship and everything that we want to do and going into sectors of VR, which are 100% the direction that we should be going as it relates to technology, but the basis of entrepreneurship is not being taught. Young people are not being trained in this section. Innovation is now the driving force of the youth economy. So says the Sa'afah Lewis Community Colleges head of the Innovation Hub and Gateways program, Brent St. Kaffring. St. Kaffring highlighting the need to capitalise on technology explained that the college is creating five innovation labs to address technology training for the youth. The first one is an ICT media lab. And this is where we want to get into as I spoke about app development, software development, animation and so forth. We need to get on board with these things in St. Lucia and we need young people who are more creative than older people that's been proven to get involved in that. Okay. The other lab we have and I'll try not to mention all of them. The other lab we have, which is very important is a virtual reality lab. And virtual reality is becoming extremely important right now. I mean, given the restrictions, the travel restrictions where it comes to COVID, we see people doing a lot of virtual tours and that is becoming a very profitable business. Also, in terms of education, virtual reality is a tool that has been used overseas that we haven't adopted here. And I'll give you an example. It's very expensive to do heart surgery and these things you go abroad. It's very costly here. We cannot afford the equipment and that kind of training. However, we can do it using virtual reality. You don't have to work on a live heart, but you can actually use tools and perform that kind of surgery, you know, within a safe environment, not on an actual person. I hope not. So what I'm saying is that we are developing these labs because we are aware that there is a transition and we need to bring the youth on board to be able to profit from that. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development identifies the area in which urgent action is needed to ensure sustainable progress in human development. And among these, the employment of youth represents a priority area that is attracting growing attention. Former youth advocate Alex George Jr. explained that proper mechanisms must be implemented to determine pertinent data, including youth operated businesses, contribution to GDP and youth employment, to name a few. I think part of the challenge is first defining the involvement of young people across all these sectors. And but of course there are some areas where young people are gravitating towards. So culture and creative industries is certainly one of them. Renewable energy is another area. We were hearing of course, ICT in a very general way, digital economy. So a lot of these nice colors that we hear about, orange economy, green economy, that's young people there who can certainly be driving that. And I think the question is what do they require to be able to get better access? Now you may have a situation where let's say in the construction sector, you know, where you have set players, usually very large players, is there a possibility from the public sector side, can we provide some level of a handicap towards youth-owned enterprises so that they can get a share of the pie? You know, in terms of how we work in the tendering processes, do they get some sort of advantage? Do they get some sort of maybe a quota or some sort of idea where we can know across the government perhaps, in terms of public procurement, it should be perhaps worked in that we know that yes, companies that are driven by young people can in fact get part of that pie. The word youth by definition is the period between childhood and adult age. According to the United Nations, the global youth population is expected to total 1.29 billion in 2030 and almost 1.34 billion in 2050. From the government information service, I am General Norvel.