4,500 persons targeted in 2022 GOAL scholarships

Georgetown: The Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) 20,000 scholarship initiative has been allocated $1.3 billion to continue the development of Guyana’s human resources in 2022.

Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for finance, Dr. Ashni Singh made this declaration during the presentation of Budget 2022, on Wednesday. 

Minister of the Public Service, Sonia Parag

 “To ensure even wider access to tertiary education, the GOAL programme offered 6,000 online scholarships in keeping with His Excellency’s mandate to accelerate the development of our human capital.

This exceeded our target of 4,500 due to the overwhelming response by the public to this initiative. In 2022, an amount of $1.3 billion is budgeted to meet the cost of another 4,500 scholarships, as well as 2,726 continuing students.”

The government’s 20,000 online scholarship programme is the fulfilment of a pledge made to provide opportunities for educational development nationwide. Within the first year of its launch over 8,000 citizens applied for the free-online programme.

Recently, the government through GOAL, partnered with eight new institutions to meet the challenges and demands of various sectors in Guyana. This includes the oil and gas sector, engineering and construction and information security.

GOAL is set to offer 187 programmes that can be accessed from 15 reputable academic institutions across the world, including India, Africa, the United Kingdom and Germany. The programmes, which are being financed by the Government, range from certificate-level to PhDs.

The online programme will see some 4,500 people benefiting from scholarships every year over the span of five years.