Youth Summer Employment Programme (YSEP) Launch
Keynote Address
by
Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At
Youth Summer Employment Programme (YSEP) Launch
On
June 17, 2025
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Allow me to stand on the protocols already established.
Safe to acknowledge, especially the Minister of Local Government,
The Mayor of Kingston and St Andrew and his colleague mayors and members of the system municipalities of the KSAMC who are here
Members of the public service who are here in support
And of course, you, the young people who are participants and beneficiaries of this amazing programme.
The minister of local government has explained that this year’s programme involves 10,000 youth being employed, but that is not the extent of the government’s summer employment programme. There is a cohort of youngsters being employed through HEART. I don’t have those numbers with me, but I’m certain it is in the thousands and of course, today is not their day.
I know that the Ministry of Science, Energy and Transportation now also has a special programme. But right across the government, all ministries have their own little programme that they employ students and youngsters in the summer, and I would venture a guess that when you add them all up, you could easily be looking at about 20,000 young people who are directly impacted by government summer employment. And that’s quite significant considering that the youth population, and when we say youth, I’m looking at the population between 15 and 24, it’s maybe just over 530,000 Jamaicans, possibly about 18% of the Jamaican population would be considered within that cohort of youth, and the government is directly impacting approximately 20,000 of that number so that is significant and worthy of note.
I can share a personal experience with you because not so long ago, I too was participating in the government summer programmes. Yes, just the other day. My mother was a civil servant in the Ministry of Social Security, and so she always ensured that if I were not with my father on his farm in the summers that I was doing some summer work at her ministry. It was an excellent experience for me to be in the offices and observe the work and listen to some of the workplace gossip; fascinating discussions. And of course, those discussions would oftentimes meander off into current affairs and politics, so it was good to understand the thinking of the ordinary Jamaicans in workplaces.
But my job was to assist the ministry in updating NIS cards. I don’t know if that is still being done because 20, 30 years ago or more than that, the system was not digital and I see some members here are nodding in affirmation, and so you would have to take application forms and transcribe from one form and put it on a card, which would become the NIS card to update the paper-bound NIS database.
So your work in updating government data, which is what you’ll be tasked to do, is not new, but you are going to be doing it on a far grander scale than what I was doing. And in fact, one year, I worked not in the office, but they tasked me to go all over Linstead and Bogwalk and into some far reaches in St Catherine to find and register persons for the NIS, and it was a wonderful experience.
I took the bus every day, and you came off in a community, and you walked around, and you found the elderly persons, and you got the information from them to update their database and to get those persons who were not registered to encourage them to make their voluntary contributions to the NIS programme and that gave me a tremendous insight into rural communities and how people think and how people view their government.
And then when I went to university, I participated in several research projects where I did surveys and interviews with the then Professor Don Robotham and the SALISES (Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies) at the University of the West Indies. And I did one particular study which placed me in Portland for about three weeks studying the impact of coffee farming on our rivers because there is a potential environmental hazard for fertilisers from coffee leaching into rivers and that sent me into some far reaches of Jamaica, places I have never been before; a place like Cascade, and all the way up in Green Hill in the hills of Portland, lovely places and that gave me another great insight.
I share all of this with you to say that the value of your summer work is definitely the little pay you’ll get, and I say a little because it’s not a lot of money, but that’s not where the value is. And if you’re coming into summer work to say I made a lot of money, then you will lose the value. The value of the experience is what you should appreciate and take away with you. That experience is going to make you a better person, a more knowledgeable person, a more rounded person, a more prepared person, and it is going to give you the edge in the world of work over others who would not have a similar experience.
The summer work programme is about building character. It’s about building a better you, and I say to you that I am a better person. I am a better leader. I understand my people better because I have had these real and varied experiences, and I was able to not just look at it from an experiential way, meaning I’m living it and working it, but I was also able to look at it from an academic way. I was able to look at the data I collected. I was part of the data collection. I could have looked at the studies and I gained a better understanding so I say to all of you who are participants in the programme, yes, the financial rewards at the end of it you’re going to be happy, but the real value is the experience, and I want you to approach your job with this zeal for knowledge, the zeal for gaining the experience because ultimately the purpose of this exercise is to provide you with a transitioning bridge from the world of school to the world of work,
Notice that I’ve used the careful terms. It’s a transition from the world of school to the world of work, not the world of employment, because there’s a difference. No one can guarantee you employment, but if you don’t work, you can’t live, so we want to empower you with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be able to work because it is by the sweat of your brow that you shall eat. And if someone doesn’t employ you, it doesn’t mean that you cannot work and in today’s world, most young people are now recognising that they can work independently. In other words, they can do their own business, they can create their own value, they can be self-employed, and what we want is an economy of workers, whether you’re going to work in a company, work in your family business, or work to set up your own business. What we want every Jamaican to have, every young person to have, is an appreciation for the value of work. Don’t look down on any work. Don’t say this doesn’t pay me, so I’m not doing it.
There has been a corruption in our society in terms of our value system, where we believe that we can get fit without exercising. Yes, likewise, we can get rich without working. I know this may not sound comfortable for some, but it is the reality of life that there is no wealth without sacrifice, so I implore our youngsters here today to restore these values in our country. We must work for what we want. We must create the value that we want.
Now, as I’m speaking about values, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious. Minister McKenzie said, forget about the parties and the hairstyle. If you want to look good and you want to have fun, I don’t have a problem with that. When I was your age, I went to the parties too, and I tried to look good, but in my upbringing, from an ambitious but poor family, we held on to certain ethics. If we didn’t have it, nobody would know. If other people had it and we didn’t have it, we were happy for them. Never badmind anybody, or wish bad on anybody. We came from an ethic of work, so we believed in working for what we want, so we put in the work.
The kind of ethic that I would love to see all my young people have is what I would like to describe as a pro-social ethic, meaning you take a positive view towards society. Unfortunately, sometimes, from our young people, we see negative positions being taken against society. In other words, an anti-social position, “somebody a fight against me, somebody a deprive me”, instead of starting from a position like ok, these are my challenges, these are my obstacles, but I will overcome.
So, as I have this lovely gathering of young people, I appeal to you to take a positive view on life. Don’t follow those people who all they do is spew negative, try to ride and stir up discontent and then make promises to you that make no sense and cannot be fulfilled. Be positive about your future. Take a positive view, take a pro-social view on life, not an anti-social view on life. And then I want you to take a pro-growth view on life because a lot of time we are told don’t even bother trying, you will come out to nothing. And you have heard that said, transmitted from parent to child, a dampening down of the ambitions, and you hear it said, “you think you’re better than we”. That’s a part of how this kind of anti-social, anti-growth ethic is transmitted to our young people. I want you to be ambitious.
I want you to be aspirational. I want you not to be afraid to dream. I want you to explore possibilities and options. I want you to disrupt the status quo and deliver new things and new value to the society. I want you to be innovative, and that’s what it means to be pro-growth, and I also want you to be economistic. What does that mean to be economistic? I want you to understand that every decision you make in life can lead to either a gain or a loss, that’s number one.
And number two, there is nothing in life that is free. It may not cost you, but it costs someone else and so you have to live your life always being careful as to how you allocate the resources that are given to you, and you want to allocate these resources to get the best for you, your family, your community, your country, and the world because you are not just a citizen of Jamaica, you are a citizen of the world.
For example, your consumption decisions. Am I consuming things that are going to create global warming? I changed my consumption decisions. Am I using my time in the best way that is going to advance the benefits of my family? And it is here that I want to make a segue as I close because there are many youngsters who are thinking economistic, and they may be saying that the best way for me to use my time and get the fastest return is to get involved in a criminal activity.
Why am I saying this here? I’m saying this here because more than 90% of the people who are murdered in our country are males, and of that, more than 80% of them are youngsters between 14 and 29. That’s the age group, but that is also our most productive age group, and over 90% of the perpetrators are males between 14 and 29, and if you talk to all of them, they’re all antisocial. They take a very negative view of life, but they’re all economistic. They believe that they’re going to take the fastest route to wealth or riches. What we have done as an administration is to change the risk-reward function for crime.
This administration has invested over $90 billion, not just in the JCF, but in the entirety of our national security apparatus to change the risk-reward function for crime.
So if you believe that by getting involved in crime, you’re going to make a profit because the risk of being caught is low, you are mistaken. Sadly mistaken at that. It is very risky to be a murderer and a hitman in Jamaica today. So, the youngsters who are considering joining gangs, it is very risky to be a gang member today.
While we close the opportunities in criminal activity, we are opening up the opportunities for you to pursue legitimate, formal, pro-social, pro-growth, economistic opportunities in Jamaica that will make you a better person without depriving anyone else of their life or their freedom to enjoy their life and that is the Jamaica that we want to build. And that is a Jamaica that we want you to inherit and build on. Jamaica, my friends, is at an inflexion point. Inflexion point means one thing in mathematics, but I’m going to translate that into our social conversation.
This is the point where the efforts that we have made in transforming Jamaica are yielding greater results relative to the efforts made. So in other words, it’s not that we’re going to slow down the effort that we are making, but the efforts that we’re making are yielding incredible results.
Think of it this way, we were investing from 2016 to 2023 significantly in security resources. We bought new offshore patrol vessels. When we came in, we had two patrol vessels that couldn’t leave the dock at Port Royal. We bought maritime patrol aircraft. We bought radars. We increased the fleet. We re-fleeted the JCF. We increased the size of the JCF and the JDF. Today, the JCF is about 14,000 at its establishment. Back then, it was about 9,000. The JDF is close to 10,000. Back then, it was about 6,000. We increased the number of men and women there. We improved our capabilities in Jamaica Customs. We improved the leadership and doctrine of the security forces, and all the time we were doing that, we were being roundly criticised. But then suddenly the switch flipped, and then in 2023, we had a 7, almost 8% reduction in murders. In 2024, we ended up with a 19% reduction in murders. And now, as we speak, we are at a 44% reduction, year on year, year to date, on murder.
So you can see that almost seven years of effort, and within the last three years, you’ve reached the inflexion point, and you start to see the gains. The same thing with our economy and our debt. And as we maintain this positive outlook, this positive view, this pro-social, pro-growth, economistic view, our country will reach its true destiny. The destiny that all of you hope for, you may express it in different ways. Some people want to go party every day and bling bling; that’s maybe your view of prosperity. Others want to go to university and be able to study. Others want to buy a house. Others want to buy a house for their mother. Some people just want to see their roads fixed and water in their houses. We can deliver that, we can do that but it starts with a positive mindset. It starts with a plan, and it starts with the country taking a positive attitude towards itself.
So with this presentation, I hope that I have engaged your minds and touched your hearts and that you will value the experience that you will gain in going out in Jamaica to check the light poles to see if the bulbs are on or off. That’s very valuable because almost on a daily basis, people complain that their street lights are not working, so with this, we keep track. And the data that you are collecting, which will go into a system called ArcGIS, which will be available for the entire government, will feed into an important policy of the government, which is the proper physical organisation of our country.
Some of you come from communities where you have no formal system of addresses. Some of you come from communities where your roads have no names and are not known on either the parish council or the central government register of roads. We have to change that. We have to give everybody in Jamaica an address, and we have to make sure that all our names of roads are standardised. We have to know where every electricity pole is and which lights are not working, when, where, and why. We have to properly document the physical built environment of Jamaica so that it improves your life and your well-being.
So my friends, again, thank you for listening, and I hope that you have a better outlook and better understanding of the programme. God bless you. Enjoy the Summer Employment Programme.