A hotline through which young people can get help for mental health issues and a transition programme for students entering secondary school are among initiatives that the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment intends to introduce soon.
Minister Charles Griffith made the disclosure on Sunday as he assured that while his ministry has also been pushing sports-related projects, initiatives that focus on the mental health of the island’s youth remain high priority.
Addressing a St George North Branch meeting of the ruling Barbados Labour Party at the St George Primary School,
Griffith said the youth hotline will be established to address mental health issues.
“Coming out of COVID-19, we are cognisant that there are a lot of mental health issues that are going unnoticed. There are a lot of things happening in our young population that are not being addressed. One of the ways that the Government believes that we can deal with this particular situation is to have a youth hotline,” he said.
“All of you that are sitting can call and say ‘there is a problem in St George North [or] wherever, we have a youngster who is giving problems, we have a youngster who is being abused’. You don’t need to identify yourself [but] that would provide an opportunity for us to come in and help to remedy the situation or to provide an opportunity to change what is happening in that particular location.”
Griffith further revealed that a Moving On initiative will be rolled out in short order to help students get through the transitionary period between primary and secondary school.
“[It] will see facilitators going into this primary school and all the primary schools immediately after the 11-Plus exam [Barbados Secondary Schools’ Entrance Examination] and what would happen is that we will deliver topics that we believe can strengthen the capacity of those youngsters who would be moving from primary to secondary school,” the Youth Minister told the gathering.
“We will be dealing with anger management, we will be dealing with conflict resolution, we will be dealing with civics in terms of how you treat to everything that is happening on the island. We are delivering a basket of deliverables to every single young person who is in the primary setting and moving on.”
Griffith stressed his ministry’s commitment to restructuring some of the vocational classes and programmes that fall under its remit so participants can be properly certified.
“When I was a youth officer at the same ministry, I used to agitate almost every single year that what we were doing to those persons who were involved with our projects was nonsense. You would do a programme for three or four months, you would do makeup for three or four months, you would do nails for three or four months, and then you would have a graduation and then you would be presented with a certificate of participation.
“I thought it was nonsense…. January last year when I took up position at the ministry, I indicated that all of our programmes that we are doing now of that nature must be certified. Thankfully, we are at that place where all of those training programmes that would equate to vocational training are now certified,” he said.
