Students set to participate in CIP

Twenty-six University of the West Indies (UWI) students will be contributing to Regional Advancement in Parenting and Early Childhood Development when they travel throughout the region this summer to participate in a Caribbean Internship Project (CIP). {{more}}

The Project is a partnership established between the Centre for Population, Community and Social Change, an outreach thrust of the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, UWI-Mona, and the Caribbean Support Initiative (CSI).

The participating countries include St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, St. Lucia, , Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. The Bernard van Leer (BvLF) Foundation, the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and the UWI support the CIP.

This year, the students were selected from the three UWI campuses representing the disciplines of social work, education, sociology and research, psychology, law and media. Sixteen of the students placed this year are Jamaicans, three Barbadians, four Trinidadians, with one each from Guyana, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Kitts.

The interns are expected to apply the skills learnt in their academic programmes to the various CSI projects in the participating islands. Some of the CSI supported projects include the Regional Radio Project (RRP), the Roving Caregivers Programme (RCP), the Story-Telling for Early-childhood Parenting Support (S.T.E.P.S.) and the Revision of Pathways to Parenting Manual.

The project started in February this year, and will end in September. There are, however, further plans to involve the University of Belize in assigning five additional students by September 2005.