Bajan Students To Gain Work Experience
Basseterre, St. Kitts – Nevis
November 11, 2009 (CUOPM)
Some 25 students from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados will soon be off to St. Kitts and Nevis to experience the workings of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
Word out of Bridgetown, Barbados, states that the students who will arrive here on November 22nd, gathered at the CSME Unit, Tom Adams Financial Centre, for a preparation session.
Preceding that was a Press briefing at which communications specialist at the CSME Unit, Salas Hamilton said: “For the next generation of students graduating, seeking employment, whether as wage earners or by creating businesses, we decided to take you out of the classroom and put you in the field.”
The students would be grouped by the processes of the CSME – movement of services, movement of capital, movement of goods and movement of skills, and assess whether St. Kitts and Nevis was operating in accordance with the CSME.
He said the project, which involved 11 other student missions between other CARICOM nations, was being funded by the European Union (EU) at approximately euro 0.5 million under the Ninth European Development Fund.
Head of Regional Integration, Political, Trade, Press and Information of the EC Delegation in Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean Elsa Fenet said the EU identified with the CSME because of its own integration experience.
She considered CARICOM’s staging of the 2007 Cricket World Cup “a tangible example” of the creation of a single domestic space in the Caribbean.
“The single market experience is therefore not only about governments and institutions. It is about the people seizing the opportunities offered by the treaties. Some private sector organisations are obviously looking very closely at the application of the common external tariff. As for the Economic Partnership Agreement, treaties offer a framework of rights and opportunities that have to be exercised by real people: you for instance,” Fenet told the students.
After the briefing, CSME programme manager Ivor Carryl told the MIDWEEK NATION the Barbados student mission would cost euro 35,000 to 40,000 and the students were drawn from various disciplines at UWI. They would depart Barbados for St. Kitts on November 22, and spend one week there.
“We have set up appointments for each group. For example, the people dealing with capital will go the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, commercial banks, the office of the registrar of companies and private enterprises in order to get an understanding of how things are set up from the point of view of Government and the non-government sector. . .” Carryl said.