WHILE economic experts propound theories for lifting the poor and the dispossessed out of the miry clay of poverty, many agents of development are convinced that with literacy, the acquisition of skills and access to credit, great strides in basic development are possible.

When people lack the rudiments of language communication, that is, they are not functionally literate, they find it almost impossible to participate in the civil processes of their communities.

Such persons cannot even decipher the notices or announcements that would help them to benefit from the social assistance available for themselves and the well-being of their children. They even run the risk of endangering their own lives and the lives of the people with whom they associate. A case in point recalled is the near-annihilation of a Jamaican family by a cook who picked up a packet of rat poison believing that it was a new condiment for the pot.

Some illiterates have no idea of the importance of registering the births of their children, and consequently when they are urged by community social workers to get their young children into government schools, they lack birth certificates as well as medical records that would indicate the children were inoculated against such diseases as mumps, measles, whooping cough and diphtheria, and tuberculosis.

If even at that late stage, efforts could be made to obtain birth certificate and the necessary vaccines, some hapless parents have great difficulty remembering the dates of birth of their offspring. There, unfortunately, could begin another instalment in the saga of a dispossessed family.

Both anecdotal and documented cases indicate that when unemployed and underemployed persons acquire marketable skills they inevitably turn their lives around and become psychologically imbued with a greater sense of purpose. They acquire an aura of dignity because they know that they are valued and respected for their abilities. Their earning power confers self-respect and they have faith in the future.

Access to credit is a boon for those persons who find it difficult to obtain regular employment. The phenomenal micro-enterprise movement began by the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the Third World.

In the 90s, no lesser agency than the World Bank recognised the value of micro-enterprise loans and allocated millions of dollars to be used in this way by poor communities. The loans were just US$100 each, but in many societies that was enough to help the poor and the hapless to create successful businesses by which they empowered themselves to rise above abject poverty and utter hopelessness.

Early in the 1990s, the Guyana Women's Affairs Bureau (WAB) in collaboration with UNICEF launched a fund for assisting women. Mothers and grandmothers, many of whom were heads of households, were given a short, live-in course in food preservation at the Guyana School of Agriculture at Mon Repos, East Coast Demerara. They were schooled in the techniques of operating small businesses and then offered loans to commence their own ventures. The programme was a resounding success.

We believe that skills training in conjunction with start-up capital can do wonders for poverty alleviation. And here we must commend the Institute for Private Enterprise Development (IPED) and Scotiabank for their contributions which have transformed the economic fortunes of thousands of Guyanese.