Ellerslie Sunrise Rotary member David Broadhead continues to do wonderful work co-ordinating the club's participation in this programme of collecting tools, equipment and machinery that is no longer being used here, and donating them to the schools and institutions in Fiji and elsewhere to help them educate and train young people to have productive lives.
Youth unemployment, together with limited support for rural livelihoods, has emerged for decades as a major intractable problem for Fiji and the Pacific Island countries.
People are increasingly moving to urban centres to find formal employment. However, jobs are limited and 60 percent of people in full-time formal employment are earning wages below the poverty line. Rural areas, despite outmigration, continue to be the home for half of Fiji's population. Fiji's key exports are rural based, providing the greatest potential for future development and prosperity, particularly in the agriculture, forestry, fisheries and tourism sectors.
The Tutu Rural Training Centre (Tutu) was established by the Society of Mary on Taveuni in 1969. The mission statement of the Centre is to provide a place/presence in which the people of Cakaudrove are empowered to become more autonomous and take charge of their lives in a rapidly changing world.
The Centre offers programs to prepare community members for rural self-employment. The courses now offered are the Young Farmers, Married Couples and Young Women's Course.
The Young Farmers Course (YFC) was first introduced in 1983, The aim is to help form and train young single men from the province of Cakaudrove to be autonomous, responsible and mature young adults, who are able to take control of their own lives and live productively as self-employed farmers on their own land.
The Tutu Rural Training Centre has had a major impact on the people of the province of Cakaudrove. Nearly 2,000 young people have completed the various courses on offer over the last 42 years. Most of the graduates from courses returned to productive lives, earning a livelihood from the farming of their own land. Students at the Tutu programme (usually a 4-year course) learn to and build their own house, make the furniture for it (here a bed), grow crops and budget. They are paid for what they do, but their earnings are kept in separate savings accounts for each student until they are ready to leave, when they take their savings with them.The recent donation by the Nicholas family of their father's entire workshop (see above photos) has been donated by the club to the Tutu Centre, to help with the work that it does. Above is a picture of the workshop before it was packed away and sent by container to the Rotary Club of Taveuni via Ian Jenner's freight forwarding business.
The largest, and most valuable item is a large metalworking lathe, seen here being put into the container, but also included in the container were workbenches, a compressor, drill press and grinders, plus dozens of hand tools, and workshop equipment and materials.
Article comes from the Ellerslie Sunrise Rotary Bulletin.