Cit­i­zens who are un­em­ployed or liv­ing in pover­ty should not blame the Gov­ern­ment but in­stead take ad­van­tage of the many free ed­u­ca­tion­al pro­grammes that are avail­able.

“Peo­ple don’t like me to say these things be­cause they want to tell you that if you’re in a gut­ter it’s the gov­ern­ment’s fault,” said Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe.

“No, you have to come out and meet us on the half too. The pro­grammes are there, the struc­tures and sys­tems are es­tab­lished for you to get out there and find that thing you love and are pas­sion­ate about.”

Cud­joe made this state­ment yes­ter­day at the sign­ing of a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing (MOU) be­tween the MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy and the Ex­port Cen­tres Com­pa­ny Ltd (EC­CL). She told the au­di­ence it is im­por­tant to re­mem­ber that this coun­try was built on ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion.

“For­mal ed­u­ca­tion is not the on­ly ed­u­ca­tion, hence we cre­at­ed MIC, CCC, YTEPP, to give every­body that sec­ond, third, fourth and fifth chance, to give every­body that op­por­tu­ni­ty to get out of pover­ty, to give every­body that feel­ing that there is some­thing avail­able for them to do. If you wake up and say you feel to be a bar­man, there’s a course some­where in T&T for you to do that cour­tesy the Gov­ern­ment and the tax­pay­ers.”

She ap­pealed to cit­i­zens not take for grant­ed that some of these cours­es are free of charge.

“We as a Gov­ern­ment, we are here to fa­cil­i­tate these pro­grammes, but you have to reach out and touch and run with us too. We don’t have the an­swers for every­thing but we pro­vide these pro­grammes to help you for free, I don’t know how long for free,” she said.

How­ev­er, there are peo­ple Cud­joe be­lieves should be pay­ing for the pro­grammes.

“We’re boast­ing that we are train­ing over 6,000 peo­ple per year in the Min­istry of Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment’s Com­mu­ni­ty Train­ing Pro­gramme and EC­CL and if you’re train­ing thou­sands of peo­ple per year but you’re not cre­at­ing thou­sands of busi­ness­es per year, then you’re cre­at­ing hob­bies.

“This should be a pri­or­i­ty for peo­ple who are un­em­ployed, peo­ple who are look­ing to make a change as it re­lates to in­come gen­er­a­tion, not a doc­tor or lawyer who say they are home and have a lit­tle time so I’ll do a lit­tle some­thing, you should pay, but that’s an­oth­er sto­ry for an­oth­er time.”

Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly, who re­cent­ly re­turned from Ja­maica’s Champs Track and Field event, said her coun­ter­parts were im­pressed with the breadth of train­ing T&T of­fers to its young peo­ple for free.

“As you may or may not know, in Ja­maica you have to pay for some of your CXC sub­jects, so even at that lev­el you have to put out. T&T maybe for many years we had this, so we take it for grant­ed that all of these things are avail­able but it is not so even in the re­gion, so our young peo­ple have to take it very se­ri­ous­ly when these op­por­tu­ni­ties are avail­able to us and there are many,” she said.

Yes­ter­day’s MOU sign­ing so­lid­i­fied the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the MIC-IT and EC­CL. The lat­ter is the state en­ter­prise in charge of this coun­try’s craft in­dus­try.

EC­CL chair­man Roger Roach said their work­ing re­la­tion­ship was con­cep­tu­alised when they de­cid­ed to ex­pand the func­tion­al­i­ty of craft skills.

“EC­CL recog­nised that the skills learned through our decades-old PVC fur­ni­ture course could be re­de­vel­oped, reimag­ined, mod­ernised, and ex­e­cut­ed in such a man­ner that en­ables craft ar­ti­sans to learn to build hy­dro­pon­ic sys­tems,” he said.

Roach said 25 trainees com­plet­ed the in­tro­duc­to­ry stage of the pro­gramme last De­cem­ber and all of them are still in the pro­gramme at the in­ter­me­di­ate lev­el. Roach said the goal is for all of them to be­come hy­dro­pon­ic en­tre­pre­neurs.