Against a backdrop of growing demand for agile, future-ready work skills across all industries, the head of Barbados’ Small Business Association (SBA) has emphasized that young people across all career paths need core entrepreneurial competencies to thrive: innovation, risk assessment, and opportunity-spotting.
Speaking Wednesday at a Youth Forum held as a centerpiece of the annual Small Business Week – this year themed *Beyond Borders – Positioning Small Business for the Global Economy* – SBA Chief Executive Officer Lynette Holder outlined the event’s core mission to a group of students from The St Michael School. The annual youth-focused forum, a permanent fixture of Small Business Week programming, was created specifically to introduce young Barbadians to entrepreneurial concepts while building transferable skills that serve them no matter what professional path they choose.
“Now we’ve ensured that each year as we coordinate Small Business Week, we carve out a special day for you, the young people of Barbados,” Holder told attendees ahead of the day’s scheduled workshops and discussions.
A key focus of this year’s forum was shining a spotlight on the SBA’s long-running *Enterprise in Action Youth Programme*, an initiative launched in 2009 in partnership with secondary school principals and business education instructors across the country. Designed for students enrolled in Principles of Business and related business-focused coursework, the program gives young learners hands-on exposure to how entrepreneurship works in practice.
Importantly, Holder stressed that the program’s goal is not to push every student into starting their own business immediately after graduation. Instead, its core objective is to foster an entrepreneurial mindset that prepares young people to be the next generation of leaders, regardless of their sector.
“The intention is not to produce all entrepreneurs from your cohort; no, our intention has always been to encourage entrepreneurial thinking, to train persons and to help persons become leaders of the future, and to be able to think entrepreneurially,” Holder explained. “Persons who can innovate, persons who can take risks, persons who can problem solve, persons who can seize opportunities as they are presented and seek to maximise those opportunities and realise some return on the opportunities.”
Holder also highlighted the SBA’s longstanding strategic partnership with Barbados’ TVET Council, a collaboration that expanded the association’s educational reach in 2015 when the SBA was officially designated a center for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) programming. This partnership led to the development of a specialized NVQ Level 2 qualification in entrepreneurship tailored specifically for young learners.
The first cohort of 65 students completed the qualification and graduated two years ago, marking a major milestone for the initiative. To date, the *Enterprise in Action* programme has reached an average of 215 young Barbadians every year, a scale Holder called “significant” for expanding access to future-focused skills across the country’s secondary education system.