Duke of Edinburgh Awards to go wide

Submitted by Narayan24 on Tue, 16/02/2010 - 8:14am

The Minister for Education, Youth & Sports Mr Filipe Bole intends to see more youths participating in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Programme (DEAP) this year.

The programme attracted 814 participants last year, most of whom were students. The Department of Youth and Sports hopes to recruit 1,200 youths many of whom are to be drawn from religious groups.

This move comes after the programme was allocated $30,000 in the 2010 budget and a $90,000 injection last year from the Vodafone ATH Fiji Foundation.
The funds would now help the Youth and Sports department to promote the international youth challenge programme to more young people.

Meanwhile, the department recently organised a youth officers' training to orientate the participants on the operations of the award programme and the objectives of management to decentralise the award function to the divisions.

The decentralisation effort will also improve the quality of the department’s services whereby monitoring and evaluation, assessments of diaries and record books will be managed by the divisions.

In 2009 the $90,000 grant made available to participating schools by the Vodafone ATH Fiji Foundation saw a rise in schools participating in social services as part of their extra-curricular activities.