PM: 80,000 graduated from YTEPP

PRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning said the Youth Training and Employment Partnership Programme (YTEPP) had since its start in 1988 graduated some 80,000 persons out of an enrollment of 152,042. In a speech read by Minister of Community Development Joan Yuille-Williams, Manning congratulated the graduation ceremony of YTEPP Cycle 22 on Saturday at the Physical Education Centre, University of the Werst Indies UWI, St Augustine. He said: “It is high time we recognise YTEPP for the important national institution it has become.” Noting YTEPP trained people in entrepreneurial and motivational skills, and in family services like child-care, he said: “I wonder if the YTEPP is not now beginning to set the stage for rivaling some of our well-known or more celebrated institutions of technical training and higher learning.”

YTEPP, he said, offered courses like garment construction, upholstery, food preparation, carpentry, masonry, joinery, furniture design, and plumbing. Manning said YTEPP might be showing signs of “bigger, brighter and better days, and more salubrious things to come.” He urged graduates to continue their education after graduation and to be a role model to other youngsters. Manning listed his Government’s programmes in basic education and training, including the Craft Skills and Artisan Programme, Geriatric Adolescent Programme, Export Centres Programme, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Adolescent Mothers Programme. “Each such programme has emerged out of recognition of particular social ills and needs that needed to be addressed.” The programmes were multi-dimesional he added, saying they aimed to both develop youth and empower ordinary men and women to contribute to national development.

“The Government has been concerned to increase the positive and progressive options available to our young people.” The Government, he announced, was now putting the finishing touches on two intiatives towards youth development — establishing a National Youth Policy and a National Sports Policy. The youth policy would address areas like youth rights, labour, health issues like AIDS/HIV, and would include the establishing/reorganisation of institutions like the Division of Youth Affairs and the National Youth Commission. “We are seeking to empower our youth...We want our youth to play a greater and more positive role in the development of Trinidad and Tobago.” He said the sports policy would be run by a coming National Sports Commission. He promised: “Gone are the days when our sportsmen and women have to scratch the earth in pursuit of their and our ambition in sport.”