Above: Kingston (CJ Photo)
By the Caribbean Journal staff
Jamaica is testing an on-the-job training initiative targeting families that participate in the country’s conditional cash transfer programme.
The pilot project, financed by the Inter-American Development Bank, will subsidize as many as three months of training in private firms and then track their “ability to find suitable employment,” according to the IDB.
It represents something of a shift from traditional conditional cash transfer programmes, which have usually transferred cash to poor families in exchange for meeting conditions like making regular visits to doctors or sending children to school.
Recent IDB studies have reported that on-the-job training has proven “quite effective” in Latin America and the Caribbean, the multilateral lender said.
The pilot programme targets 1,500 beneficiaries.