$6m Allocated for New Scholarship Cohort Under Rio Tinto Alcan Legacy Fund

A total of $6 million will be disbursed under the Rio Tinto Alcan Legacy Fund scholarship and bursary programme to support education-related expenses for a new cohort of agricultural students, soon to be announced for the 2025/26 academic year.

This was disclosed by Business and Entrepreneurship Development Manager, Jamaica 4-H Clubs, Amanda McKenzie.

“For this year, we had 217 applications. Last year, we supported more than 100 students and we are looking forward to maintaining that number this year,” she told JIS News.

Ms. McKenzie noted that the selection process will be finalised upon completion of parish-level interviews.

“We have gone through the short-listing process. So we will have parish interviews in September and October to finalise the selection,” she added.

The scholarship programme, financed through the Rio Tinto Alcan Legacy Fund and administered by the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ), is designed to promote social development by investing in recipients’ skills training and educational advancement.

Since its inception in 2010, the Programme has empowered approximately 1,500 secondary and tertiary students to pursue agricultural studies.

To date, it has provided more than $197 million in funding support to students residing in St. Catherine, St. Ann and Manchester. These parishes are former sites of Alcan’s bauxite mining and alumina refining operations, which spanned 59 years prior to the conclusion of its local engagements in 2001.

Ms. McKenzie noted that the scholarship covers a range of education-related expenses, including tuition, transportation, meals, books, uniforms, and agricultural tools.

She emphasised the scholarship’s importance to the agricultural sector, noting that 85 per cent of the beneficiaries continue to work within the field, based on an impact assessment.

“We have seen where… persons would have gone on to establish careers within the sector or have gone on to agri-entrepreneurship where they started their own businesses related to agriculture and other agricultural fields. So, there is definitely a high retention and, hence this ensures that our labour force related to agriculture is maintained,” Ms. McKenzie said.

She further disclosed that recipients are encouraged to pursue studies in high-priority areas where skills gaps exist within the sector, pointing out that “a lot of focus is given to the technical areas, such as genetic breeding, et cetera”.