(Jamaica Observer) Jamaica is to become the first country in the Caribbean and Latin America to have a Junior Achievement Biztown (JA Biztown), a model business town in which students in Grade Five will be allowed to run their own businesses while learning the basics of financial responsibility.
The announcement came last Friday at the groundbreaking ceremony at Caenwood Centre, St Andrew.
JA Biztown is the Rotary Club of Kingston’s major project for 2013-14.
“The aim of the project is to get 10,000 students across the island at Grade 5 level to participate and discover practical life skills that they can take with them for life. By participating, students will get a taste of the real world,” said Allison Peart, president of the Rotary Club of Kingston.
“In North America there are successful companies that have been started before getting to grade five and I don’t see why that couldn’t happen in Jamaica,” she told the Jamaica Observer.
She added that while the project targets students in Grade Five, there are other projects that the Junior Achievers Jamaica (JAJ) has for other grades.
“We chose to focus on students at the grade five level as we believe that at that level they are at the point of their lives where this information will be most vital, especially basic things like opening a bank account, which you may never learn in a classroom. JA Biztown will teach students this and many more valuable life lessons. We want our nation’s youth to not just to be scholars but financially literate,” Peart explained.
