Among the more interesting and potentially exciting initiatives announced by the Government during the recent parliamentary debate on the Budget was the one to help young people jump-start their business ideas - YEP.

As outlined by Prime Minister Bruce Golding, YEP, or the Young Entrepreneurs Programme, will target school leavers. The Government, through the Development Bank of Jamaica, has promised to put up $250 million, for on-lending by micro-financing agencies, to school leavers who have worthy projects but no money to fund them. Interest on these loans, the cap on which is yet to be defined, will be 10 per cent.

We endorse the idea for precisely the reason enunciated by Mr Golding in his parliamentary address - but also for more.

As the PM noted, of the estimated 40,000 students who 'graduate' from Jamaican high schools each year, perhaps 14,000, or 35 per cent, will go on to higher studies. A handful will find jobs. But nearly two-thirds of the annual graduates, as Mr Golding put it, "go home with nothing to do".

This is, of course, not some temporary problem, now being exacerbated by the global economic recession - although it is having an impact on its severity. It is an endemic feature of the Jamaican economy, to which the grave underperformance of the country's education system is a major contributor.

Indeed, the cumulative effect of this crisis is particularly produced in Jamaica's unemployment statistics and other demographic data.

For example, approximately 22 per cent of the labour force in the 20-24 age group, which is the one more likely to benefit from the Government's initiative, is unemployed. Joblessness among women in this age category is higher at 31 per cent, or twice the rate of young males who, though, are considered most at-risk as the disproportionate victims and perpetrators of Jamaica's problem of criminal violence.

But the broader problem of hopelessness faced by the army of so-called unattached youth is not constrained by gender. YEP suggests an opportunity at an intervention for some of them, who will leave school, with some level of skills, before they are drawn into deviance or caught by other social problems.

But beyond its potential good as a short-term piece of social engineering, YEP suggests to us a wider economic value if it is used as a model for something far more fundamentally transformational.

Venture capital

The fact that students who qualify for the project will be taught the basics of managing their businesses is good, as is the potential for opening the minds of young people to the concept of venture capital.

We would suggest, though, that the substantive idea of YEP be taken into schools, at both the primary and secondary levels, into a specific and compulsory course on entrepreneurship.

While there is in Jamaica this draw towards individual ownership and an ostentatious display of possession, there is, paradoxically, an ambivalence to formal enterprise and the creation of corporate wealth. This is considered the purview of the 'big man' who, in Jamaica's economic mythology, is the evil devourer of the people.

YEP may beckon a pathway towards reality.

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