NINE Trench Town residents who recently graduated from a four-month training programme in entrepreneurship, were presented with cheques totalling $155,000 as start-up funds for new micro enterprises.

The programme was organised by the Joy Town Community Development Foundation (JTCDF) in association with the Jamaica Business Development Centre.

Three other graduates plan to establish a fish farm, chicken houses and a honey production line and will need special funding and continuous technical assistance, which the JTCDF is committed to supporting.

Executive director of the Kingston restoration Company, Morin Seymour, commended the training programme spearheaded by the JTCDF, and aimed at achieving economic self-reliance for residents of Trench Town. Seymour said the programme could possibly be the “catalyst that leads to lasting and positive changes in the economic fortunes’ of people of inner-city communities”.

Seymour, speaking at a breakfast function hosted by the JTCDF at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston, praised the foundation’s 20-year plan of returning Trench Town to its “glory days’ has been an ambitious programme under the guidance of its president, Major Richard Cooke. “Indeed (this programme) is the best antidote to the gloom and doom that now pervades our urban centres.”

At the same time, he encouraged the budding entrepreneurs from Trench Town to apply for further funding from the KRC’s new Micro Enterprise Financing which is aimed at helping community residents “pull themselves up by their bootstraps through savings and investments at the community level.”

President of the JTCDF, Major Richard Cooke, said there were plans to roll out the modules at least three times a year with an average of 30 participants per session. He paid tribute to the individuals and organisations, chief of which is the Jamaica Broilers Group of Companies, which made a significant contribution to the $80,000 budget of the programme.