Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice Fos­ter Cum­mings has con­firmed that stu­dents un­able to ob­tain a full CSEC cer­tifi­cate will not slip through the cracks.

Dur­ing his Bud­get de­bate con­tri­bu­tion in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, Cum­mings said his min­istry con­tin­ued to work close­ly with the na­tion’s youth to en­sure they are not left be­hind.

He said a re­cent project in part­ner­ship with the Cipri­ani Col­lege of Labour will pro­vide a plat­form for stu­dents to un­der­go the nec­es­sary train­ing to re-sit the ex­am­i­na­tion.

“Some of our young peo­ple are leav­ing sec­ondary school with­out the re­quired 5 O’lev­els. This pro­gramme will in­clude a camp for stu­dents to pre­pare to re­sit the CSEC and to ex­pose them to of­fer­ings at Cipri­ani to ma­tric­u­late to oth­er ar­eas of train­ing.

“We re­cent­ly launched this pro­gramme in Sep­tem­ber, af­ter it was ad­ver­tised for one week, we had over 1,500 ap­pli­cants. We did have to close it off at that point be­cause we thought the pi­lot would ac­com­mo­date 1,000 stu­dents.”

Cum­mings al­so not­ed that in­vest­ments made in the agri­cul­ture sec­tor are ex­pect­ed to bear fruit next year.

“We have trained so far, madame speak­er, in ex­cess of 800 per­sons and we pro­vide lands for all of them to get on with their farm­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go. We have trained 300 per­sons in shade hous­ing and 200 in aqua­cul­ture and we in­tend to stand firm to our pol­i­cy po­si­tion and our promise to in­tro­duce to the agri­cul­ture sec­tor, 1,500 youth­ful farm­ers by 2025.”

He al­so de­fend­ed Gov­ern­ment’s shade house project in the face of crit­i­cisms from Op­po­si­tion mem­bers that the project had col­lapsed.

“Those shade hous­es re­ceived from the gov­ern­ment of Guyana will be dis­trib­uted in the fol­low­ing man­ner, five to the THA, two to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, who are our part­ners in the shade house pro­duc­tion pro­gramme, they pro­vide the train­ing for the stu­dents to our low­er agri­cul­ture schools ECI­AF, UTT and the re­main­ing three will be set up at our Beach Camp Youth Com­plex fa­cil­i­ty in deep south for the ben­e­fit of the young peo­ple in that area.”

He main­tained that gov­ern­ment in­ter­ven­tion pro­grammes have been mak­ing a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in the lives of at-risk youth.