BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – JUST about 30 individuals are expected to be the beneficiaries of an OAS-funded programme geared at promoting entrepreneurship and computer literacy while highlighting the cultural properties unique to each community.
The project, dubbed “I-trepreneurship”, is a collaborative venture undertaken by the National Skills Training Programme and the Department of Culture.
According to Director of the NST Programme Fritzroy Wilkin, the project would focus predominantly on Webpage Development, Cultural Awareness with Research, Entrepreneurship and History dotted across its scope.
The first phase of the project, as the National Skills Director indicated, lasts an approximate three weeks and would see participants undergoing rigorous training in the mentioned areas. He said the second part would involve the participants branching out into their respective communities to gather information which would be used to build a website for their community.
“After the training, the other phase of the project would be for them to go out into the communities, collect information about their community - history, art, culture, anything specific to their community - and they would package that to create paraphernalia and or web pages. What we are hoping as an outcome, to see community webpages being developed so that persons can look at a webpage for let’s say Cayon, and get quite a lot of history, anything about culture specific to Cayon.”
The proposed span of the project is April 2009 to April 2010. However, owing to the ongoing YES programme which is executed in a number of community centers around the island, the implementation of this programme – which would be executed at community centers – had to be postponed.
Wilkin explained that he is hoping to launch the project in September of this year and informed that application forms are available from the Health Centers in the various communities.
He said the OAS is providing US$55 000 for the project and its coordinators are seeking 30 suitably qualified individuals to tackle the challenge. The simple criteria outlined by Wilkin are: (1) applicants must have an interest (2) applicants must be 16 or older and (3) applicants must have basic computer training.
Although the project officially ends in April 2010, Wilkin indicated that NST and the Department of Culture would “continue working with these small business people (as they), continue to research and get their businesses going”.
It is the coordinator’s belief that the project would also play a role in promoting tourism.
For further information about the project, individuals can contact the National Skills Training Programme.
