Loyse Vin­cent

Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Kelvin Charles has called on the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB) to part­ner with the THA to fight To­ba­go’s “high” il­lit­er­a­cy prob­lem.

Speak­ing at the of­fi­cial open­ing of the NIBTT’s To­ba­go Ser­vice Cen­ter at Fin­cor Build­ing, Ba­co­let Street, Scar­bor­ough, yes­ter­day, Charles, al­so Sec­re­tary of Ed­u­ca­tion, said the “high” il­lit­er­a­cy rate must be ad­dressed “ur­gent­ly and de­ci­sive­ly.”

He added: “To the ex­tent that we have a high pro­por­tion of our young peo­ple be­ing un­able to read, to that ex­tent I sug­gest that if we don’t move to treat with that so­cial ill then some of the un­in­tend­ed con­se­quences that we want to avoid as we build this is­land, it will be dif­fi­cult to avoid.”

Min­is­ter of State in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter Ayan­na Web­ster-Roy, who al­so spoke, asked of­fi­cials of NIB to find in­no­v­a­tive ways to en­light­en To­ba­go’s pop­u­la­tion about the cor­po­ra­tion’s ser­vices.

She said I want to en­cour­age NIBTT to con­tin­ue to work to­wards cre­at­ing new and in­no­v­a­tive ways to reach our peo­ple whether through print me­dia, face to face or on­line.”

She al­so en­cour­aged To­bag­o­ni­ans to “be proac­tive and seek in­for­ma­tion about new things, rein­vest­ing and its po­ten­tial ben­e­fits” and not­ed that they “must be­come seek­ers and con­sumers of in­no­va­tion and in­for­ma­tion.”

Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor of NIB Naila Per­sad–Po­li­ah called for leg­isla­tive re­form to the NIB op­er­a­tions as ben­e­fit ex­pen­di­ture ex­ceeds col­lect­ed con­tri­bu­tions.

“Out of a pop­u­la­tion of 61,000, the num­ber of reg­is­tered em­ploy­ers in To­ba­go stands at just 950 em­ploy­ers. There are just over 8,500 ben­e­fit re­cip­i­ents who col­lec­tive­ly re­ceive in ex­cess of $245 mil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year,” she said.

Ex­press­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments, chair­man of the NIB Jacque­line Quam­i­na said the time has come for cit­i­zens to sup­port the need for changes to the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Sys­tem.

“The pa­ra­me­ters of an in­vest­ment fund can­not re­main sta­t­ic while To­ba­go, the en­vi­ron­ment, the de­mog­ra­phy and the econ­o­my in which we op­er­ate con­tin­ues to change,” Quam­i­na said.