Prime Minister Hon. Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, while appearing as guest on VC3’s Roundtable Talk in response to a question from a viewer, discussed the PRYME program, confirming that it will continue.
“PRYME continues. I stated it before. The Minister of Finance, Camillo stated it in January when he presented the estimates and it went into the budget in early February.
There is funding for this year, in fact we put additional funding because of COVID, when we went back to parliament on April 7th with supplementary budget, and we have indicative funding for next year, it will be in the budget, and for the next year and for the year after that.” Gonsalves said.
The Prime Minister went on to discuss the number of applicants the programme has and how much people are expected to receive grants by the end of the year.
“PRYME is not going to stop. They have four thousand-something maybe four thousand five hundred, maybe the number is more than that now, in terms of applicants, and by the end of the year they probably would have approved maybe 1,200, which is a significant number, because they have to go through the assessments and so forth.”
The PRYME programme was initially created to contribute to the empowerment of young people between the ages of 18-40 years old, alleviation of poverty, enablement of entrepreneurship and the creation of new businesses, through grants ranging $2,500-$40,000.
Due to the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic PRYME Plus was then created to cover individuals over the age of 40.
