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Employment Opportunities Focus for Youth Month

October 27, 2003

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With November being celebrated as Youth Month, the National Centre for Youth Development (NCYD) is planning a slate of activities, which will seek to create employment opportunities for young Jamaicans, and to address their concerns. Director of the NCYD, Ohene Blake, told JIS News that the activities would include a media workshop and a number of entrepreneurial seminars that would be hosted islandwide.
Following the launch of Youth Month with a National Service at the Morant Bay Methodist Church in St. Thomas on Sunday, November 2, the NCYD Director said that over 2,000 young people would be targeted for the five entrepreneurial seminars scheduled to be held throughout the month of November, in various parishes across the island. He explained that the seminars would primarily seek to empower young people with entrepreneurial knowledge.
The main purpose of the entrepreneurial seminars, Mr. Blake noted, is to be instructive to young persons in detailing the information they would require in establishing businesses of their own.
The seminars would allow young people to interact with entrepreneurs and according to the NCYD Director, would also “provide them with some of the basics on what it takes to operate a business in a business environment”.
He told JIS News that young people could anticipate learning “the basic things one would need to know to make a small business successful”.
As such, sessions at the seminars would address business related issues as ethics, taxation, the requirements needed to register a company, and rudimentary accounting practices.
Four seminars are already scheduled for Kingston at the University of Technology on Tuesday, November 4; St. Catherine, at Ascot Hall on Friday, November 7; St. James on November 10 at the Seventh Day Adventist West Jamaica Conference Centre; and St. Mary on Thursday, November 13 at the Emmanuel Baptist Church. Meanwhile, the fifth seminar is being planned for Manchester.
Mr. Blake informed JIS News that the seminars would pay attention to four particular career fields – the entertainment and cultural industry, agro-business, manufacturing and distribution, and e-business and commerce.
He said that the NCYD had partnered with several ministerial and private sector companies to lend support. They include the Ministry of Industry and Tourism; Ministry of Commerce, Science and Technology; Scientific Research Council; the University of Technology; Technology Innovation Centre, and the Bank of Nova Scotia.
In addition to the planned five entrepreneurial seminars, the NCYD will also host a media workshop. It is anticipated that the workshop would have the participation of journalists as well as editors, advertising executives, programme managers and the heads of the media organizations, Mr. Blake noted.
The workshop is designed to serve as an important meeting that would allow young people to interface directly with those working in the media. It would take the format of a discussion forum for young people to communicate their views on the images and messages they see being transmitted by the media.
Likewise, he said persons in the media would be afforded the chance to hear “what young people are looking for and how the current programming and messaging of the media is impacting on their development”. The workshop is tentatively scheduled to be held at the Wolmer’s High School for Girls on Thursday, November 27.
Youth Month will culminate with the annual Prime Minister’s Awards for Excellence, which will be held on Sunday, November 30 at Emancipation Park.
The public is invited to nominate young persons who have made outstanding contributions in the fields of culture, the arts, agriculture, sports and academics; significant voluntary service or entrepreneurship, or contribution to community building.
Nominations are to be submitted by October 30 to any office of the Social Development Commission, the parish offices of the National Youth Service, the Ministry’s regional offices and the NCYD’s Youth Information Centres in Portmore and St. Mary, as well as the NCYD’s head office at Caenwood Centre on Arnold Road in Kingston.

Last Updated: October 27, 2003

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