167 to take up employment with SET, YES programmes

One hundred and sixty-seven persons will, from the beginning of September, take up employment as part of the Support for Education and Training (SET) programme and the Youth Empowerment Service (YES).

Sixty-seven of these persons will be employed on the SET programme, while 100 will be YES workers, bringing the total number of persons working through these initiatives to 767.

The workers will be employed at several government and statutory bodies and Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves said this week that he has sourced $1.35 million to pay stipends to the 167 individuals.

He said this money is in addition to the $3 million being used to pay the 450 YES workers and $2 million for the current 150 SET employees, bringing the entire amount of money for the programme to $6.35 million.

Dr Gonsalves revealed that this group of SET employees all have A Level subjects and Associate degrees and that the 90 or so persons with other degrees were hired in an earlier batch.

The SET programme was launched in 2014 with the aim of providing Community College and university graduates with work experience, while the YES programme was launched in 2001 and has as its objective to provide training opportunities for young people between the ages of 16 and 30 years who are out of school.(LC)