– through Urban Shade House project

As part of a vision to facilitate community wealth and economic empowerment through ownership, President Dr. Irfaan Ali through the Ministries of Agriculture and Local Government has introduced a model project to the Tiger Bay community.

Fifty shade houses will be constructed to allow for mainly women and youths to earn and is intended to be hands-on and community driven.

The initiative is aimed at transforming small grants into sustainable income-generating opportunities for communities. 

A key requirement of the project is that at least 35 percent of the beneficiaries must be young people and women.

To set the project in motion, the President is leading by example, working alongside his team to personally demonstrate how the project will be carried out by doing the work themselves.

“We expect entire 50 beneficiaries to help each other to establish the shade houses and then to show you how we are going to tend to it and so you are going to see us rotating every morning for the next 6 to 8 weeks until we have our crop ready to be harvested here in this demonstration shade house. The idea here is to translate this grant that we spoke about into wealth creation and to demonstrate in a real way how we will be able to transform lives and how we will be able to build business opportunity,” the president said during a recent engagement in Tiger Bay.

Minister of Agriculture, Zulfikar Mustapha noted that similar projects have already been launched in various regions across the country and are now being introduced in urban communities.

He adds that projects such as these helps to supplement income for families.

“When you go around the country and you look at the agriculture sector more and more female are talking part in agriculture, why, because we are making agriculture more modern we are making it more easy, because after this model project you will see how you can earn easily,” the agriculture minister pointed out.  

Support for this project will be sourced from the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry to ensure the initiative’s success.

Meanwhile, Minister of Housing and Water, Collin Croal, has also been tasked with replicating the same model in a homestead setting. 

This week, 50 homes are expected to participate in a similar shade house project, expanding the reach of the initiative.