4H youths graduate from agricultural programme

While the police are charged with the duty of bringing criminals to justice, it is also clear that the rest of us need to provide the Belizean children with alternatives to violence and crime. One of those initiatives is called “Youth for the Future”. Over the weekend, co-ordinator of the project, Nuri Muhammad was the guest speaker at the graduation ceremonies for the 4H agricultural programme. During his speech, Muhammad stressed the importance of making sure the system is there to support the youth.

Nuri Muhammad, Co-ordinator, Youth for the Future

“Our point here is that if we don’t have special intervention programmes along the line of youth development such as what is provided by 4H, then our system itself, though it tries to be fair, ends up with many of our young people falling through the cracks. And so this institution becomes one of the outstanding institutions in the context of Belize. Because even though we would want, and I can say those of us who look very much at this, and those from the ministry have been saying for a long time, if we could only double this, triple this, if we could only see one hundred young people graduating from 4H, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing. Wouldn’t that be fine for us instead of seeing twenty odd of them, see a hundred and odd of them having gone through that same preparation that Mr. Ramos and his staff has done. But that’s that challenges of Youth for the Future, to make sure that we can increase that number without losing the quality.”