OECS member countries plan to focus attention on the creative energies, talents and challenges of the region's youth in the second OECS Human Development Report, (HDR) due by the end of 2008.

At a meeting of the Policy Advisory and Technical Committee for the OECS HDR on Thursday March 13th, Director General of the OECS Secretariat Dr. Len Ishmael, said the youth focus will also take centre stage at the upcoming second annual OECS International Development Conference (April 3rd and 4th), whose theme is based on the music and film industries, and the on-going OECS Youth Initiative mandated by the OECS Heads of Government.

Dr. Ishmael said the region's youth have been showing tremendous promise and ability in the area of creative arts: "It seems to me that one of the things that our youth have in no small measure of course is the creative energies or creative talent and perhaps if we can find some ways of infusing the issue of our youth with our own new service oriented creative industries project, whether it's in theatre, craft, music or film we might be able to safeguard the futures of some of them and that is a challenge that I am going to put before our Social Policy Unit."

The Director General also noted the high level of enthusiasm and excitement among OECS Heads of Government over the formulation of the new Human Development Report.

The 2008 OECS Human Development Report Committee meeting, while reinforcing the need to address prevailing problems such as deviant behaviour among males, also pointed to the need to urgently address increasing problems among females such as teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. It was an issue raised by Dr. Rosina Wiltshire, the resident representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is supporting the HDR:

"There is an underside with the young women that is as not as visible and that is the significant increase in teenage pregnancies which is not normally part of a phenomenon of a region that is middle income, moving to high income and setting itself on the path of being developed societies in the next decade or so. The link to increased prostitution as an underside of what we are seeing with the boys - drug trafficking and HIV AIDS - but the increasing number of women and especially young women, where we have what we call a crises within youth in the region it is manifesting itself in different ways with the boys and the girls and the dimension of the girls is not as visible to the population as the manifestation of the boys. So we are in danger of loosing the big picture."

The OECS Human Development Report is coordinated by the OECS Social Policy Unit. It assesses the status of human development in OECS Member countries in terms of their capacity to achieve competitiveness, maintain growth, improve human and social conditions as well as reduce poverty.