ECCB empowers over 1000 in Savings and Investment Course
By VonDez Phipps
Reporter-SKNVibes.com
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Trevor Brathwaite, Deputy Governor
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BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – 41 persons reached a milestone in their lives when they graduated from the 9th Cohort of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) Savings and Investment Course this past Saturday (Dec. 6).
The graduating class increased the total number of successful participants to an impressive 1110 graduates of the programme across the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU).
The 10-week course, facilitated in part by the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (CFBC), ended with Saturday’s classy graduation ceremony and dinner at the Ocean Terrace Inn.
The course served to empower participants in relation to financial literacy and focussed heavily on wise spending, saving, investment, debt management, risk management and securities exchange among many other similar areas
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The event began with a symbolic candle lighting ceremony where each participant passed the flame to another until all graduates were holding their ignited candle, representative of the knowledge they gained and mandated to pass on. Participants from the various groups made short presentations in song and dramatization portraying the change that the course has brought to their lives and showed how one person’s knowledge can be used to empower others.
Deputy Governor ECCB Trevor Braithwaite, in addressing the graduates, stressed the importance of this course in allowing participants to be able to achieve even greater things.
“I would like to consider you [the graduates] as a part of an illustrious group of individuals who took the challenge and took advantage of the course. One major objective that was noted was that many of you show interest in starting your own businesses and I am especially pleased to know that this course is pioneering entrepreneurial spirit in the region.
~~Adz:Left~~ “We need to put our minds together in order for us to live in a single financial and economic space. I want to encourage you to think of the many opportunities that are unfolding before all of you and take advantage of them so that they may be of benefit to you in allowing you to be able to comfortably live in a single financial and economic space. I also urge you to maximise on your newly-acquired knowledge; think seriously about the next step. Take this as a platform to launch into the next stage of your life.”
Troy Hendrickson, CEO of Caribbean Journey Masters and Guest Speaker for the event, highlighted the challenges and risks involved in starting a new business, and shared his secrets to success with the graduates. He underscored three core elements of his business: good working relations with customers and business partners, effective company strategy and unique business operations. Hendrickson encouraged the graduating class to keep being “consistent, creative and patient”- three characteristics he opined grant a new business its distinction.
Olivia Edgecombe-Howell, Resident Tutor at UWI Open Campus (St. Kitts-Nevis) gave congratulatory remarks to the 41 participants who are now more prepared to make wiser and more informed choices in savings and investment.
