Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vices Min­is­ter Fos­ter Cum­mings says he is pleased with the young vot­er rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Mon­day’s Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion.

Speak­ing at the launch of the min­istry’s Youth Week at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ Teach­ing and Learn­ing Com­plex in St Au­gus­tine, Cum­mings said young peo­ple are show­ing more in­ter­est in pol­i­tics, and through the min­istry’s many pro­grammes, they plan to get them more in­volved.

“I did no­tice that there were a lot of young peo­ple in­volved. As a mat­ter of fact, in the elec­tions there are a lot of young can­di­dates on both sides of the fence, and there­fore we would love to al­ways en­cour­age young peo­ple to get in­volved in the po­lit­i­cal process.”

He added, “We in­tro­duce to them all of the range of pro­grammes that the Gov­ern­ment has avail­able for their own de­vel­op­ment. So, they see it as the Gov­ern­ment tak­ing a per­son­al in­ter­est in their de­vel­op­ment and they’re com­ing on board at a rapid rate.”

Cum­mings said he was al­so pleased with the elec­tion re­sults and promised his La Hor­quet­ta/Tal­paro con­stituents that he will con­tin­ue to work with the cor­po­ra­tions for their ser­vice.

“We are a Gov­ern­ment in midterm and we are quite hap­py that we have been able to re­tain all of the cor­po­ra­tions that we held be­fore these elec­tions, and we will, of course, con­tin­ue to try to ex­pand that. But the main fo­cus, of course at this time, is to move to­wards lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form and that will in­volve all of the cor­po­ra­tions even those held by the op­po­si­tion par­ty,” he said.

He said they will con­tin­ue in­fra­struc­tur­al work in the north­ern and south­ern ar­eas of his con­stituen­cies.

In his fea­ture ad­dress at the event, Cum­mings said such ini­tia­tives are crit­i­cal for the de­vel­op­ment of the na­tion’s youths.

“The Gov­ern­ment on­ly re­cent­ly ap­proved a mi­cro and small busi­ness grant and by the term grant, you un­der­stand that it is not a loan, it is not to be paid back, so that over 1,000 young per­sons will ben­e­fit from this an­nu­al­ly, and we in­tend to in­vest over 24 mil­lion dol­lars each year be­cause the pro­gramme al­so in­volves some lev­el of train­ing and men­tor­ship to be ex­e­cut­ed by NED­CO,” he said.