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Statement by the President Announcing an International Conference on "Human Skills in the Decade of Development."

September 03, 1962

IT IS appropriate that on this day dedicated to the contribution which the skills of American labor have made to our national development, I am able to announce the convening of an international conference devoted to the role of human skills in creating rapid economic progress for the developing countries.

Under the sponsorship of the Peace Corps, with the cooperation of the Departments of State and Labor, and the Agency for International Development, the United States government has invited more than forty nations to a conference on "Human Skills in the Decade of Development (The Middle Level Manpower Approach)" to be held in Puerto Rico on October 10-12. Most of these nations will be represented by delegates of Cabinet rank. Our own delegation will be headed by the Vice President and will include the Secretaries of Labor, and Health, Education, and Welfare.

I regard this conference as a milestone in the formulation of a strategy of economic development. In the last fifteen years many nations and international agencies have been engaged in the task of supplying and training skilled manpower for the underdeveloped world. From this experience has come a heightened awareness of the critical importance of human skills in economic development.

Many recent studies, including surveys the development of the United States, have indicated that human skills and technology are an even greater factor than capital investment in effecting a rapid transition to a developed economy. It is vital that we combine past international experience with new developments and knowledge in order to give urgent and intensive consideration to ways in which these critical human skills can be developed and modern technology applied to developing economies.

The particular focus of this Conference will be on Middle Level Manpower: That range of skills lying between the unskilled laborer and the highly trained scientific skills such as doctors or engineers. It includes the nurses, teachers, construction foremen and the hundreds of others whose talents can make possible the effective and productive use of a Nation's resources. And there is no doubt that the techniques developed in this field will be immediately applicable to the entire range of a Nation's manpower needs.

This will be one of the largest high level conferences on any aspect of economic development held since World War II. It will be the first such conference involving the worldwide participation of both industrialized and developing countries. Since the impetus for this meeting came from the Peace Corps those countries have been invited which are participating in Peace Corps programs or themselves have a tradition of volunteer services.

I am hopeful that from this meeting will emerge new techniques of assessing man power needs, new methods of rapidly supplying and training skilled manpower for all the developing countries and, perhaps most important, a vastly heightened and informed understanding of the critical role which human skills play in the great work of economic and social progress.

Note: The statement was released at Newport, R.I.

John F. Kennedy, Statement by the President Announcing an International Conference on "Human Skills in the Decade of Development." Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/236718

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