Raphael John-Lall

T&T has a long way to go to be­fore its in­dus­tries be­come more com­pet­i­tive said Cur­tis Man­choon, chair­man, Uni­ver­si­ty Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT)."Two weeks ago I was in Lon­don at the Lon­don Fash­ion Week. We took three of our grad­u­ates of fash­ion de­signs and ex­posed them and in one of the work­shop ses­sions it be­came more clear that some­times the busi­ness knowl­edge that is nec­es­sary to com­pete in a fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive in­dus­try like the fash­ion in­dus­try, we need­ed to do a lot more.

"We be­gan to talk about ne­go­ti­at­ing with buy­ers or de­sign­ing an award-win­ning gar­ment, but do we have the man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bilites to sup­port that in­dus­tri­al clus­ter?" he asked.Man­choon was speak­ing yes­ter­day at the launch of a train-the-train­er work­shop at the Cen­tral Bank, Er­ic Williams Com­plex, Port-of-Spain.

The pro­gramme, a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Cen­tral Bank and UTT, will run for sev­en weeks and will in­volve more than 300 stu­dents."UTT was es­tab­lished pri­mar­i­ly to con­tribute to the eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment of T&T and so we make a dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from the tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties be­ing in­volved in aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies for the pur­suit of pure knowl­edge to a uni­ver­si­ty which is more aligned to the so­cio-eco­nom­ic chal­lenges of the so­ci­ety," Man­choon said.

"We are all aware of the ma­jor chal­lenges of crime and eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty. At UTT we have been try­ing to give light to that mis­sion."Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­bar­ran said lat­er this year there will be a new fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy sur­vey.

"In 2007 the Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Pro­gramme (NFLP) con­duct­ed a na­tion­al base­line fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy sur­vey and it re­vealed that many of our cit­i­zens have lim­it­ed knowl­edge about mon­ey man­age­ment. The sur­vey showed that more than one third of the re­spon­dents were clas­si­fied as hav­ing low fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy.

"I am pleased to an­nounce that the Bank will be fol­low­ing up with an­oth­er fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy sur­vey in the sec­ond quar­ter of this year. The re­sult of this sur­vey would help the NFLP to bet­ter tar­get train­ing in­ter­ven­tions in­clud­ing pro­grammes like train the train­er."Ram­bar­ran said en­tre­pre­neur­ship is im­por­tant in eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

"At the bank we be­lieve that de­vel­op­ment of the en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it is vi­tal to eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, sus­tain­able job cre­ation and wealth gen­er­a­tion," he said.