Hinkson urging Bajans to seek training

A Government backbencher is taking some unemployed Barbadians to task for not grabbing hold of the free opportunities to improve their skills.

During the Barbados Labour party (BLP) St. James North branch meeting at the Gordon Greenidge Primary School, Rock Dundo St. James on Sunday night, Member of Parliament for that constituency Edmund Hinkson expressed his irritation.

“I get frustrated when I hear some of our people say they can’t find work or they want a job and when I ask them . . . what skills do you have, you can’t get anything out of them or you hear them say they could do anything. And when my response is, ‘well you can’t fly a plane or spaceship to the moon. Come again, what can you do? And we giving you this opportunity and this is of course after 12 years of free education, between ages 4 and 16/17, that – we are giving you a second opportunity as a young adult to get training, to get skills, to be able to provide for yourself and your family,” he said.

Listing programmes such as the National Transformation Initiative, Ministry of Community Development and Vocational Training Board, Hinkson stressed that there are a plethora of choices if people really wanted to enhance themselves. Furthermore, he noted that within the St. James North constituency alone, they have also assisted others to build their own capacity, in the past eight Saturdays hosting training programmes, life and work skills programmes and even conducted prep interviews with practising human resources management specialists.

Emphasizing the need to reform and centralized the welfare department, Hinkson pushed the community programmes as a means to solve intergenerational poverty and get Barbadians off welfare.

“There will be some who will remain and every society has that – it is impossible to get rid of. But intergenerational poverty is one of the issues that is affecting us seriously. That our grandmother was poor, suffering had maybe too many children that you could really deal with, didn’t have support maybe from the father of these children, and it boils down that the mum came to this position and now you in the same position. We got to break this cycle somehow because it can’t be that because of our history that we’ve remained in this position. And we will do our best to try to break this cycle of intergenerational poverty. (KC)