Empowering Dominica’s youth has become a top priority for the Roosevelt Skerrit-led Administration.
Several advances on Government’s part were made to the young people of St. Joseph in recent times.
With much of the feeder roads being reconstructed in that area, government saw it fit to make lands available with the intention to stimulate productivity among young people within the agricultural sector.
Parliamentary Representative for the St. Joseph Constituency, Hon Kelvar Darroux spoke about this recent initiative by government in an exclusive interview with GIS News.
“Government has gone a step further and as the Member of Parliament I have made representation on behalf of the people so that the government could make available to the people of St. Joseph the lands at Centre which used to house the old agricultural station. We are aware that when the Matthieu Dam came down in 2011, that entire area was wiped out. But now that the Matthieu Dam no longer poses a threat we have seen the need as a Government and as the Labour Party Administration to make these lands available to the people of St. Joseph particularly the young people so that they can establish some small business enterprises. I’m speaking of things like animal rearing, of beehives, the smoking of meat, short term crops and so forth and a number of other areas. This will significantly impact the livelihoods of the people of St. Joseph and provide some self sustained jobs for them. I am very pleased with this initiative and as the Member of Parliament; I’m looking forward to working with the residents of St. Joseph to ensure that we can develop this area once again and have our people back to work.”
The Parliamentary Representative, elated about this new venture, expressed gratitude to the Prime Minister.
“I must say thanks to the Prime Minister for really stepping forward and really ensuring that the people of St. Joseph particularly the young, that they could have some level of opportunity to progress themselves in a very productive way. I believe moving forward we will continue to work to ensure much more can be done here in this constituency.”
In addition, Prime Minister Hon. Roosevelt Skerrit, at the recently held St. Joseph Village Council Inauguration presented a cheque of two hundred thousand dollars ($200,000.00) to assist in the development of small businesses in that constituency.
“A number of these [young people] are extremely talented and would like the start up capital to establish their small businesses, whether it’s in farming, fishing, music development, arc welding or whether it’s our wonderful bakery here close to the back street and so forth. All of these people are interested in creating employment for themselves and we would like the council to implement that project and programme on behalf of the government and in collaboration with the small business support unit; but the council will be responsible for managing the resources. What I would like to see happen is that before anybody receives money from this programme, that we conduct about a one week training programme to test to see who is serious because if you miss one class it means therefore you have disqualified yourself. Business is a serious business.”