MONTEGO BAY, St James – After a successful start to Project STAR in east Kingston, residents of Savanna-la-Mar are set to benefit from a major social and developmental boost through the initiative being spearheaded by the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ).

According to Project Director Saffrey Brown, who spoke to the Jamaica Observer recently, Brown stated that great focus will be placed on the physical infrastructure in Savanna-la-Mar as it has been recognised as one of the issues affecting the development of the town.

“One of the biggest issues is infrastructure. They have very inadequate drainage, waste management, sewage, lighting, and very little social infrastructure. So we already established what we call a Community Infrastructure Working Group,” Brown explained.

In addition to infrastructural development, Brown noted that Project STAR in Savanna-la-Mar will aim to bridge a gap between residents and the business community through sporting and employment opportunities, similar to what was carried out in east downtown Kingston.

“We’re going to move immediately on our sporting programmes and employment programme by getting people into jobs. Savanna-la-Mar is an area that has a long history of entrepreneurship and a lot of people have expressed an interest, so we’re going to also work on that,” Brown told the Sunday Observer.

She was, however, quick to point out that there will be differences in the way these activities are carried out to meet the varied needs of the citizens, based on their community-led planning. She also noted that each intervention project is tailored to the needs of the residents, having done multiple mapping and research in the communities with the voice of the people being at the forefront of their plans.

“[Residents] can expect this project to look the way that it needs to look for their community. Project STAR in Savanna-la-Mar is going to look different from STAR in east downtown Kingston,” she said.

Brown further told the Sunday Observer that Project STAR, a $2-billion social intervention project, has got the nod of approval from the business community and Government agencies in Savanna-la-Mar as they have all expressed an interest in developing the town.

“Savanna-la-Mar is sort of a free-standing town that has had very little development over the last 70 years, so the whole business community is ready to get behind it. We have the full endorsement of the Westmoreland Chamber of Commerce. We’re also working very closely with the [Jamaica Constabulary Force] JCF, the Ministry of Justice and the municipal corporation,” Brown said.

While relishing on what she described as successes in their ongoing intervention in east downtown Kingston, Brown told the Sunday Observer that they were looking forward to engaging their third cohort in their employment training programme. The project manager was proud to share that the youth living in Rose Gardens and Paradise Garden, the two communities that were targeted, had expressed great interest in accessing job opportunities and training through the HEART/NSTA Trust Programme.

“I’ve been in development a long time and this is one of the few times where you have an abundance of jobs, but what you don’t have is an abundance of people that really either want to access or know how to access jobs. What we’ve discovered in east Kingston is that people want the job, they just didn’t know how to access them,” Brown said.

“So we have a memorandum of understanding with HEART who helped us by delivering life skills training. We do a training programme that takes about two weeks where we train up to 30 people and then we focus on getting them jobs,” she said.

She also noted that the initiative by Project STAR is highly focused on building the trust of the residents as they were no strangers to social intervention in their communities. According to Brown, residents of east downtown Kingston needed to see the impact of the project quickly to ensure its success.

“Which is why you have to go in with impactful quality-focused quick wins where you deliver what you say you’re going to deliver quickly because you’ve got to build trust. So let’s not go into the year-long training programmes trying to engage the at-risk youth in jobs that are going to take 12 months for them to even come around to the idea of it,” Brown explained.

She continued, “Everybody in the community who wants jobs, we’re focused on getting them jobs. At the same time, the supporting programme is working with at-risk youth who don’t want a job straight away, who are not really interested or don’t see it as an opportunity for themselves yet.”

Project STAR’s sporting programme has also scored major points with the youth living in east Kingston, according to Brown, who said that the police has played a key role in this.

“The police made sure that they had the space to play football, and they started to come back out into the community regularly. Remember we are talking about years of COVID and ZOSO, so the residents were not coming outside. We currently have a great football programme down there on a Saturday morning,” the project director said.