More than 1,000 youths countrywide have been equipped with life-transforming skills under the Board of Industrial Training’s (BIT) National Training Project for Youth Empowerment (NTPYE).
The institution’s CEO, Richard Maughn, told DPI that 2,383 youths entered the programme and 1,746 of them graduated last year with the rest still undergoing training. The areas of instruction included information technology, motor vehicle repairs, refrigeration, food preparation, tie-dyeing, and welding and fabrication.
“This programme continues to contribute positively to the manpower needs of local industries and to the psychosocial development of its beneficiaries and measures are already in the pipelines to get more youths onboard,” Maughn said. He added that two new areas were introduced under the NTPYE Project, namely boat building for persons living in the riverine communities and an agro-food processing project for youths of Region 10.
The latter area, Maughn said, was introduced in keeping with the government’s Green State Development Strategy’s aim to add value to agricultural produce. Some 31 youths from Region 10 were introduced to skills such as manufacturing, bottling, branding and marketing. It resulted in the packaging and production of seasoned fish, marketing of bottles of garlic and pepper sauces, along with dehydrated peppers and tomatoes.
The initiative mostly impacted the lives of single parents and birthed three small scale businesses, whose products can be found on the shelves of supermarkets in Linden. “We first started the boat building project in the Pomeroon in Region 2 and also at Baracara in Region 6. More than 45 persons from these communities benefitted from this programme which provided then the necessary training, teaching them, how to build a boat from scratch,” Maughn related. He added that BIT and the Ministry of Social Protection provided the materials for the boat along with a 75 HP outboard motor for community use. The BIT was established in 1910 under the Industrial Training Act 39:04 with a mandate to provide marketable skills for youths. (DPI)
