August 2014


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A matter of survival

The UWI St. Augustine’s Department of Geography, in collaboration with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), the School of Education and the Women’s Institute for Alternative Development (WINAD), is conducting a national study to investigate the livelihoods and futures of adults who have dropped out of school.

The study, titled A Matter of Survival: A life-course approach to understanding the decision-making and economic livelihoods of school dropouts in Trinidad and Tobago will investigate the life-course trajectories and complex decision-making of early school leavers in Trinidad & Tobago in order to analyse their challenges and successes since leaving school, returns to education or training, and economic stability and livelihoods.

The project has engaged in community-based training of about 50 researchers across the country, including Tobago, who are currently conducting surveys and interviews with adults between the ages of 18 and 45 who had left school before completing either the primary or secondary school completing exams. The study, which started in September 2013 and ends in March, 2015, hopesto de-stigmatize the discourse of school dropouts, and provide data required to affect the agendas of NGOs and the Government (including the Ministries of Education, National Security, Gender and Youth, and People and Social Development) towards poverty reduction, building human capital, strengthening families and communities, and planning tools and resources to decrease truancy, delinquency, and criminality.

The project team is composed of Principal Investigator, Dr Priya Kissoon (Department of Geography); Co-Investigator, Dr Jennifer Collymore (Department of Geography); and Data Analysis Collaborators: Prof Patricia Mohammed (IGDS), Dr Jeniffer Mohammed (School of Education), Dr Matthew Wilson (Department of Geography), Dr Joseph Springer (Ryerson University, Toronto), and FoladeMutota (WINAD).

If your organisation provides any programmes or services that support early school leavers and you would like to tell the researchers about the work that you do, please call the Research Project Office at 662-2002 ext. 84130 or email projects.geography@gmail.com. If you are an early school leaver (or know of an early school leaver) and would like to share your story with the researchers, please call WINAD at 621-2495 or email winad_tt@mail.com.