….with support from ExxonMobil

By Gabriella Chapman

YOUTH Challenge Guyana (YCG), with the support of Exxon Mobil, has expanded its Urban Agriculture Programme to empower more young persons, including residents of the city, to produce their own food.

Executive Director of YCG, Dmitri Nicholson, told the Guyana Chronicle recently that the Urban Agriculture programme has been ongoing since 2016. However, this year, the non-governmental organization(NGO) received funding from the American oil company, which, he said, enabled the entity to expand.

“As part of our expansion of this initiative, we are currently working with Elim Pentecostal church to target youths in the North East La Penitence area so that they can develop skills to produce their own food through agriculture… The aim is to ensure that more people in the city can empower themselves with these types of skills,” Nicholson said.
The youth pastor of the Elim Pentecostal church, Felicity Jackson, said that the programme will be carried in the compound of the church and will target persons from the community, primarily women and youths.

“Through this programme, we hope to have a positive impact on the lives of our young people, and our women, to develop skills to take care of their families. This is a community with a lot of school dropouts and we are looking for the programme to be fruitful. Those who aren’t working, we are hoping that they can go into that direction of taking the skills up as a means of income, and further their development as an individual. And after our time with Youth Challenge has expired, we hope to continue the work as a community outreach to help the young people,” Jackson said.

The programme with the church started on Friday last. However, due to the inclement weather, the body was unable to start the practical session.The group will be engaged twice weekly, until they would have acquired all the skills.

Nicholson said that the facilitators of the programme are three Agricultural Science University graduates – Dwayne Gangoo, Kadisha Nedd and Andrea Charles.
The trio combined their knowledge and expertise and shared same to the people of the programme so that they can learn the basic skillset of planting and producing home-grown foods.

Prior to the church group, YCG held the very programme with the residents of West Ruimveldt. This group, Nicholson said, had an excellent production.

He explained that YCG has three main areas of focus – Health, Education and Life skills and Livelihood. The Urban Agriculture Programme he said, is one of the Life skills and Livelihood projects, which aims to provide persons from urban communities, with the skillset to produce food for themselves, and in the long run, the experience and knowledge gained, can be used to venture into agricultural practices as a means of income.
Nicholson said that he believes Guyana has a lot of potential to alleviate poverty, if people’s understanding and skills to really improve their own livelihood is boosted. This project, he said, is contributing to that fact.

“It will ensure that people have the skills to not go hungry. And so if we have an economic boom and there is a food shortage, families can teach their children to be self-sustained, rather than having to rely on alternative sources to provide for them,” he posited.