Employees of the community-based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (Cepep) have been given the opportunity to further their studies at the College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of T&T (Costaatt).Cepep chairman Adesh Deonarine and Costaatt president Emmanuel Gonzales signed a memorandum of understanding at a ceremony at Costaatt, Melville Lane, Port-of-Spain, on Monday to signify a partnership to provide academic support for Cepep employees.
Under this memorandum Cepep employees will be eligible to take part in the college's Compensatory Programme for Academic Support Services (Compass) to further develop their occupational and academic skills.The initiative was developed by vice president of the Senate and Costaatt director of business development Lyndira Oudit, as a method of empowering and educating members of society who wish to advance their skills.Deonarine said, "For too long members of the Cepep and the workers have been stigmatised as uneducated. Our aim is to empower the people through the Costaatt with education."
He said Cepep would work closely with Costaatt in establishing proper programmes which would give the opportunity to workers to gain the education they would need when they graduated from Cepep.He said through Compass employees would gain the additional knowledge and skills needed to become marketable when they graduated from Cepep.Deonarine said with the appointment of a new board, serious discrepancies, including employees working in the programme over the three-year limit, were discovered. He said many of these employees simply stayed because they did not have the skills to gain employment elsewhere and in essence Cepep had become somewhat of a "welfare" programme.Deonarine said he hoped the collaboration with Costaatt would allow employees to gain the skills to graduate from Cepep, allowing others to join the programme.