Lady Belgrave impressed with children’s projects at BMEX

Words such as “impressive”, “nice” and “amazing” were heard from Lady Belgrave as she took a tour around the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre on Saturday afternoon to view the booths at the Barbados Manufacturers’ Exhibition (BMEX).

Bobbi McKay, Executive Director of the Barbados Manufacturing Association (BMA) told The Barbados Advocate that Lady Belgrave was most impressed with the work of the young people and noted it was “amazing” to see the projects that the youngsters had done and put on display.

“The children do amazing projects, whether it’s for BMEX or science fairs and then they end up on a shelf somewhere. They need to be encouraged into making them into actual products,” she said.

11-year-old Shaqkem Browne of Eagles Academy Prep showed off one of the projects that he was particularly proud of which was built to solve the problem of taking care of the plants and fish in their class, while they were on holiday in the summer vacation.

“We built a wind turbine which is attached to a pump, so it will pumpswater and wet the plants. The water contains nitrates and when it goes into the plants, it will change to fresh water and go into the fish tank,” he explained.

McKay noted that this year’s exhibition revealed a lot of unique products, by which she was very pleased to see.

“I use to get very tired of seeing what I call the pigtail mentality, where everybody was doing the same thing; now they’re all breaking out and doing different things. I’m very pleased with that,” she said.

She added that she was also looking forward to working with some of the entrepreneurs after the exhibition as it was clear that some of them needed assistance with things such as labelling and other technical matters.

“I already spoke to one of the managers at BIDC and we’re going to sit down and have a meeting to discuss way to help because some of the people really need this help with their next step,” she said.