Saint Lucia PM wants more initiatives to tackle youth unemployment, crime

As Saint Lucia marks its 46th anniversary of independence on Saturday, Prime Minister Philip Pierre has called for greater initiatives to tackle youth unemployment and crime. 

Speaking at the Saint Lucia Community of Barbados Independence Awards Ceremony at the 3Ws Oval, Cave Hill Campus, on Thursday, Pierre highlighted the nation’s recent economic strides. 

“For the last three years, Saint Lucia has achieved economic growth between two and 4.5 per cent,” he noted. He further revealed that the country’s unemployment rate is at a historic low of 11 per cent, with hopes of reaching single-digit lows later this year. 

However, he expressed concern over youth unemployment, which had been as high as 43 per cent but has now dropped to 18 per cent due to targeted investments and economic expansion. Despite these noted achievements, the Saint Lucian prime minister stressed that the citizens, living at home or abroad, must be concerned with the trend of young men being disproportionately affected by crime and underperforming academically compared to their female counterparts. 

“We are very concerned about what’s happening to our young men. At the education level our girls are doing much better than our young men at school, but we have seen some changes in that regard for our boys,” he said. 

“We want to expand on that rich intellect that is in Saint Lucia, but to do that, we have to deal with a growing problem of crime, particularly gun crime. There seems to be a pandemic of gang crime; young men going to school with each other, sat on the same bench, who are relatives, have decided that they are going to kill each other. 

“Last year we had 71 murders, about 60 of them were gang-related murders. Young men killing each other,” he added. 

To address the issue, Pierre noted that a number of social intervention programmes have been launched, but more needs to be done. He said: “We’ve tried with social interventions at the SSDF — we have a programme ‘Our Boys Matter’ — to see if we can get these young men, most of them are below the age of 25, and even younger than 15, to see if we can get them back into the system and they can find some reason to live. We are working with the churches, NGOs, and see if we can reconnect the young people in this country into our society.” (SB)