BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – WITH a small percentage of the Federation’s populace being classified as differently-abled, many of them in that category are not gainfully employed, and this could be as a result of them not having the requisite training to fit into the labour force.
However, the St. Kitts-Nevis Association of Persons with Disabilities is currently conducting training for the differently-abled in the area of Information Technology so that upon completion they can be gain meaningful employment within both the private and public sectors.
This was recently revealed to SKNVibes by the Association’s President, Anthony Mills, who explained that they would be approaching the private sector to have these individuals employed based on their newly-acquired skills.
“Well, this is the first programme of its kind in the Federation. We are actually training people with disability in various computer skills. Graphic Design and Microsoft Office is the two main ones,” Mills said.
Plans are on the Association’s front burner to approach private sector agencies to employ these individuals, and this would be done upon completion of the training programme.
“It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense that you teach them and then you don’t have jobs for them. So we need the private sector, the public sector and we need society on a whole to be receptive to hiring people with disabilities, once we are trained,” Mills explained.
“Next month we would begin to look at job placements and see if we can get them into jobs,” he added.
The President stated one of the areas of concern for the association is when individuals, who would have received injures which would leave them incapacitated or disabled, are not given the opportunity to resume their jobs in most cases.
“The companies don’t rehire them and the chances of them getting a job at another company are very slim. So the only thing that we can figure out, is that most of these businesses are not adapted to accommodate people with various disabilities. So that is something we need to see gets changed.”
He noted that these persons would also need to be retrained “like how you would retrain most other people”.
“If you start training people with disability from an early age in the various disciplines that you need to get them to work, in that way they would be able to get onto the job and that’s why this training programme we have here is such an important one.”
The training programme is being conducted at the McKnight Community Center.
