Senator announces more technical scholarships for youth

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The leader of government Business in the Senate has revealed plans for another state-sponsored scholarship initiative aimed and equipping young unskilled people with technical training in construction related fields.

Senator Lennox Weston argued that the plan was part of a policy for training citizens to fill labour gaps in various sectors, instead of paying exorbitant amounts to international consultants for the same work.

Weston said, “We need lab technicians, quantity surveyors and engineers – there are schools in Wisconsin – 13 weeks and you can be internationally certified to operate this construction equipment and maintain them. And we have our boys and girls on the block sitting down?”

The senator, also a minister of state in the Ministry of Finance, promised that the government would “identify the schools” and was going “to send off another batch for training … for a small fraction of the big money we spend on their consultants”.

According to Weston, the chief culprit in advocating for the use of consultants is the World Bank. He declared, “We’re fighting with them … they want to spend $20 million of our money bringing in consultants. We said no. We sent 17 students to Jamaica and it didn’t even cost us much more than US $100,000 a year.”

More in today’s Daily Observer.

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