Shamfa Cudjoe: Training should lead to entrepreneurship

Sport and Community Development Minister Shamfa Cudjoe said some of the people who are accessing the training being provided by the ministry in handicraft should be paying for the service as they are not converting the skills learned into businesses.

She made the statement at the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the MIC Institute of Technology (MIC-IT) and the Export Centres Company Ltd (ECCL) on Wednesday at the MIC-IT head office in Trincity.

“We’re boasting that we’re training over 6,000 people per year in the ministry, and if you’re training that many people per year and you’re not creating thousands of businesses per year, you’re creating hobbies.

“Sometimes you have the same people doing ten classes in how to do oils and soapmaking, and you’re not creating a business, you’re doing it for fun. We’re supposed to be giving priority to the unemployed, the under-employed, those who are looking to make a change, and for income generation and having an additional line of wealth creation, not a doctor or a lawyer who’s a t home and says I have a little free time. You should pay, but that’s another story for another time.

“We have invested so much time and talent, it costs us so much, and that type of training needs to convert into entrepreneurship, champions of industry, businesses that contribute to community development and empowerment, changing the stories of families, challenging the people who come from businesses and backgrounds that think that business is not for them. We can create entrepreneurs and give them the tools and the training and maybe the investment, and that will change the story.”

Cudjoe said the merger is a milestone in the development of craft development and education in TT, and takes handicraft to a new level.

“You’re putting together the human resource capacity you have at MIC-IT and merging it with what we have at ECCL. It’s giving our artisans access to more people with more knowledge and more experience to help them to improve their trade. It’s about improving the craft sector, and developing a better approach into how we do and deliver things and how they create to suit today’s society.

Cudjoe said the merger allows artisans to use the ministry’s Craft Hub and Parlour platforms to network, partner, train, learn skills, and teach.

She said formal education was not the only type of education, even though students are pushed to get their five CXC subjects.

“Life doesn’t always work out after you get five CXCs, you don’t become rich by going to work for an eight-to-four in the public service, that too is a lie. You have to use some skills that you have. God made everybody with some skill that they have, everybody is as unique as their fingerprint, and we’re helping people with that passion and desire. If you can get your CXC subjects do so, but if you can’t, that’s why we created MIC, YTEPP, CCC, to give everyone that second, third, fourth, fifth chance, an opportunity to get out of poverty. There’s a course somewhere in TT for you to do, courtesy of the government and taxpayers of TT.” (YTEPP is the Youth Training and Employment Partnership Programme, CCC is the Civilian Conservation Corps.)

Cudjoe congratulated the institutions on their vision and said she looked forward to seeing what would happen next.