Opportunities for youth in action

A three-million-dollar project to assist with youth unemployment is on its way.

At the opening ceremony of the Community-based Entrepreneurial Development & Life Skills Training programme, Selma Green; Manager of the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme explained to The Barbados Advocate that “Three million dollars has been dedicated to the project to roll out over the next financial year, to ensure that resources are provided within the communities for these young people to be able to transform their ideas to businesses.

“There will be a focus on innovation; we want them to look around their communities to see what needs exist... We launched the Entrepreneurial and life skill development component of the building blocks programme in 2019. The building blocks programme is an initiative of the Ministry of Youth and Community Empowerment and it is a comprehensive social intervention strategy that looks to be able to combat rising unemployment among youth and we are looking to roll out the programme initially for communities – Bonnets, Ivy, Parkinson and Silver Hill.

“The programme has different components, but what will also be offered is access to finance which young entrepreneurs can tap into through the trust loan facility or through fund access or the Barbados Youth Business Trust. Ultimately, we would like to see employment being generated within the community as well as a beautification component of communities.

"The programme is in the pilot stage and the pilot will come to an end on April 17, 2019, where we will bring together participants that would have completed the training programme across the four communities in a central area and we will reward their efforts. Once we do our evaluation of the programme then we will look to build it out in other areas in Barbados,” she stated.

Green indicated, “The programme is ground-breaking, because when training is done it tends to be centralised so bringing training to the community, we see some cohesion and we see a mix of women and men of all ages. Entrepreneurship is critical to our development as a small open economy; to be able to build entrepreneurs it has to have the investment of the entrepreneurship, their family and the community. We still need to build out the culture of entrepreneurship in Barbados and reframing the mindset toward work and self-employment, that awareness will come to the community through this programme. This initiative is important to increase community spirit, strengthen support for entrepreneurs and of course the economic impact by generating jobs...”

She continued, “We fear “block life” but what is a ‘block’? It is a gathering of people, but instead of focusing on the negative we need to harness that spirit in the community towards positive things. The response has been excellent. We targeted 30 participants to start with per community – we have in excess of that – and it is varied, those who now want to start and some who are already working in the community, what we want to come out of this, is that we want to ensure that the businesses that they are opening in the communities are formalised because then they can access a greater level of support through the agencies that have been set up to support them.”