MORNE ROUGE, Grena­da � Flow Grena­da and their strate­gic part­ner Bright­Path Foun­da­tion are tak­ing an­oth­er step to em­pow­er and en­able Grena­di­ans to be­come busi­ness own­ers and con­tent cre­ators.

Gail Pur­cell, Coun­try Man­ag­er of Flow Grena­da, said they will be work­ing with Bright­Path to es­tab­lish train­ing pro­grammes at the ten com­mu­ni­ty ac­cess points (CAPs) around the is­land which re­ceive free broad­band from the com­pa­ny.

Bevil Wood­ing, Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor of Bright­Path, said Grena­da has been the Caribbean's pi­o­neer in poli­cies to en­able the use of tech­nol­o­gy and has led with the de­ploy­ment of the re­gion's first In­ter­net Ex­change Point (IXP). In 2012, Bright­Path, a non-prof­it fo­cused on tech­nol­o­gy for learn­ing, worked with a group of young Grena­di­ans to teach them to de­vel­op mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions. Wood­ing said five apps pro­duced in the work­shop are now avail­able for down­load.

"We must de­lib­er­ate­ly pre­pare the next gen­er­a­tion from be­ing con­tent con­sumers to con­tent pro­duc­ers," Wood­ing said. "Tech­nol­o­gy is the ser­vant of our de­vel­op­ment."

With this in mind, Wood­ing said new train­ing pro­grammes will be launched through the CAPs lo­cat­ed in the com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres and with the sup­port of com­mu­ni­ty groups, to teach class­es tar­get­ed at youth, se­nior cit­i­zens, par­ents, ed­u­ca­tors and at-risk youth.

The in­ten­tion, he said, is to make these CAPs the fo­cal points for ac­cess­ing new mar­kets through e-com­merce plat­forms of­fer­ing Grena­di­an prod­ucts and con­tent.

"These ac­cess points can fu­el na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment. The build­ing blocks are there and the youth are wait­ing to be un­leashed," said Wood­ing.

Coun­cil­lor at the Bo­ca Sec­ondary School Sturl­ing Camp­bell wel­comed the ini­tia­tives, which he said will be to the ben­e­fit of both teach­ers and stu­dents. Camp­bell re­vealed that his school was prepar­ing to launch a new web-based pro­gramme which will al­low par­ents to see their chil­dren's re­ports, home­work as­sign­ments and com­mu­ni­cate with the teach­ers on­line. As more of the cur­ricu­lum goes on­line, he added, stu­dents will need to be able to com­plete their as­sign­ments vir­tu­al­ly and the in­creased broad­band as well as the CAPS will sup­port these new ways of learn­ing and ed­u­cat­ing the pop­u­la­tion.

Rhea Yaw Ching, Colum­bus' cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent of sales and mar­ket­ing, said the rea­son for giv­ing free broad­band to schools and com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres was to em­pow­er com­mu­ni­ties to be prob­lem solvers and make changes that have a last­ing and trans­for­ma­tive im­pact on the so­ci­ety.

Grena­da, she said, is to be the test coun­try for new ini­tia­tives be­tween Colum­bus and its strate­gic part­ners in the ar­eas of tech­nol­o­gy de­ploy­ment, con­tent cre­ation and e-learn­ing.

For more than a year now, ten of the is­land's com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres have been able to of­fer in­ter­net ser­vice to res­i­dents for a min­i­mal charge of EC$ 20 per fam­i­ly per month. Pur­cell said this fee en­ables the cen­tres to pro­vide pa­per and oth­er in­ci­den­tals for the ser­vice but more im­por­tant­ly gave fam­i­lies who did not have their own com­put­er or in­ter­net at home the same pos­si­bil­i­ties as those that were able to af­ford it.

Flow Grena­da and Bright­Path hope to launch the first train­ing pro­gramme be­fore the end of 2013.