Junior Achievement Dominica, an affiliate of Junior Achievement Worldwide, was officially launched on the island with a Capacity Building Training Workshop on Tuesday at the Public Service Training Centre.
The Junior Achievement Company Programme is an innovative educational initiative that combines the resources of the Junior Achievement of Dominica, the Youth Development Division and the 4H Club along with the Ministry of Education to cultivate enterprising lives.
Orlando Richards, Chairperson of the local chapter gave details on the programme.
He says the aim of Junior Achievement Dominica is to make school aged youth ready for entrepreneurship by exposing them to the necessary skills and information.
“The objective of the company project is to enrich the educational experience of students by expanding traditional curricular to include practical hands on experience in applying classroom learning to real world, income-earning opportunities in work readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy. The Junior Achievement company programme engages youth in the business of life. The target group is school age youth between 12 and 18 years of age. Focus is currently on in school and after school programmes, however efforts will be made to explore the possibility of including eligible out of school youths who are not captured in the formal school system.”
He also says, “The Junior achievement programme is expected to get partners, collaborators from the private sector.”
Following the theory segment of the programme, students are expected to organize their own small businesses within the school year.
Richards explained that, “Each school project is deliberately tangible, marketable products and or services using best practices for marketing, production, cultivation and growth. The products are then packaged and sold in a competitive market situation, earning revenue for the student, youth-led business. Young people learn how to set up a business, monetize a product and run a profitable enterprise including all the steps for establishing a board of directors to hiring staff, to operations management, to production planning and delivery and eventually the stage of dissolving the company because a business runs during the cycle of the school year.”
Meanwhile Chief Youth Development Officer at the Youth Development Division, John Roach, speaking at the launching ceremony of Junior Achievement Dominica stated that Government fully endorses the new initiative.
Junior Achievement, Roach says, is a programme to teach secondary school students business ownership skills.
“We realize that no private sector, no public sector can absorb in employment the number of young people graduating from either secondary school or tertiary education every year. This is not unique to Dominica but worldwide, and so when the Dominica Youth Business Trust was established, it was to address the issue of creating an entrepreneurial culture among our young people but we realize that since DYBT focuses more on the 18 to 35 age range that it was difficult for us to continue with that process. We had to look at a cadre, how do we build a cadre of young people who eventually will graduate into the DYBT.”
The Youth Officer explained that the programme directly complements the work of the Dominica Youth Business Trust in helping to reduce youth unemployment.
Natasha Yeeloy-Labad, Executive Director of Junior Achievement Dominica says administrators are thrilled by the debut and is confident that the expansion to six other schools was the right decision.
“We welcome all of those schools who are going to go forth with that vision of getting our young person’s to understand that fusing economics, work force readiness and the skills needed to survive in the world of work is very important to them and their personal development.”
The approach of Junior Achievement is to provide access to real world business professionals, college students and retired business owners to act as classroom volunteers in addition to the programme kits, classroom materials and modern learning aids provided to each participating school.