Three students at the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Northern Caribbean University (NCU) recently won paid internships at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Multi-Country Office in Jamaica.
Shertonio Byfield, Navaida Green, and Petrona Peart were the recipients of this year’s internship after entering the Development Challenge Competition staged by the UNDP in collaboration with the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, on July 10, 2020.
The NCU participants joined two other students from UWI and one student from the University of Technology (UTech) to form the winning team, named Reducing Inequalities in Education.
The competition was part of a five-day series of free webinars during the Ready Reset Recharge UNDP Youth Symposium, held July 6-10. The symposium, which occurred via livestream on Zoom and Facebook, elicited the response of youth in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean to the Special Human Development Report on COVID-19, with a goal of arriving at practical solutions for a post-COVID-19 era.
Team Reducing Inequalities in Education competed against two other hybrid teams and had only three minutes to impress the judges and their online youth audience. The judges’ scores comprised 90 percent of the total marks gained, while the people’s choice votes accounted for 10 percent.
In her closing remarks to delegates and contestants, the UNDP representative in Jamaica, Denise Antonio, said: “You have taken inspiration from the UNDP Special Report on COVID-19 and have charted your appropriate path to your priorities and contexts.… UNDP gives you our word that we will stand with you as you push for policy and behavioral change.”
