Education Ministry will ensure all parents receive “Because We Care” cash grants – Minister

The Education Ministry is committed to ensuring that all parents receive the $30,000 “Because We Care” cash grants and uniform allowances.
This is according to Education Minister Priya Manickchand speaking as the distribution exercise wrapped up. She stated that the Ministry would seek to address the issue of late registration and those parents who did not receive, owing to other reasons.
“We’ve had parents coming to say that they registered late and parents coming to say, particularly from private schools, that their names were not on the register for one reason or the other, so we’re going to have to look at what we have remaining and whether we can serve all of those persons still in a second go-around,” the Education Minister explained.
“So, there is to be two second tranches to be done, the first one being people who are legitimately on the list, but could not get here for whatever reason… they’re at work, they’re in the hospital, whatever and we’ll announce those dates shortly and then the second one, we’ll look to see whether the people who were not registered on time didn’t do what we asked them to do, if we have enough in our budget to serve them.

“I want people to remember that the budget was arrived at based on the register, so if you weren’t on the register, we would [not] have catered for you, but we may still be able to do something, so we’ll have a look at that,” she added.
The Minister highlighted that the rollout of the grant was very smooth and noted that this was the first time the Government had rolled a cash grant of this of magnitude.
“The Ministry of Education rolled out a really good programme, of course with assistance from the Guyana Police Force and the Auditor General’s office and so we’ve had not only a programme that was smooth and efficient, but one that was really accountable and very transparent and I’m very glad about that. I want you all to pause for one second and think about the fact that we just served a 190,000-something children in four days, distributing probably more than $5 billion. Of course, the numbers are now coming in. That has never been done in this country before,” she said.
Minister Manickchand assured that the Government would continue the distribution of the cash grants next year and keep its promise of increasing it each year.
“To all the parents, please know that this is going to be a continuous grant, we said that from the moment we started in 2014 that it was going to raise incrementally until it became at least $50,000 and we have stayed true to that promise, so next year and the years following this will continue and even increase. Please spend this wisely, this is supposed to be help for you to get your children prepared for school and gives us great pleasure being in your service,” she related.
The Government of Guyana initially aimed to distribute a total of 193,679 “Because We Care” cash grants and school uniform allowances this year.
This was estimated to be at a cost of over $5.8 billion.
Each child in the public and private school system would receive $30,000 – $25,000 as the grant and $5000 as an allowance for school uniform.