After an MOU signing this morning, student athletes living abroad will now have greater financial support. It's an agreement between the Ministry of Education, the Football Federation of Belize, and the Belize Basketball Federation. For the FFB, 10 of these young athletes will be receiving a monthly stipend of $600, and 39 of those from the BBF will receive a tuition scholarship up to the Bachelor's level.
Today the Ministers of Education and Sports told us how this collaboration came about.
Rodwell Ferguson, Minister of Youth, Sports & Transport
"Initially, the guys came to me and said, how can we make contact with the Ministry of Education for them to contribute towards young people scholarship who are abroad, I told him that's not an issue, I will call Minister Fonseca and explain to him what you want to accomplish and right away he responded and said Mr Ferguson, let's arrange for us to meet with them and come to a conclusion. So today's the conclusion. the agreement has been signed for an amount of students doing their Bachelor's Degree and their Associates Degree across the country, we are hopeful that we may see one of them join the NBA or the…"
"One of the major sports in the US. As a small country, it's a pity we can't provide for them in that category because we have a very small population but as we grow we believe that we can do it. So we hope that our athletes start to achieve what they want to accomplish in this life and the Ministry of Sports and the Ministry of Education will be there for them."
"It's the beginning and every year I think we'll expand, it will increase and we will see more children, more young people getting the assistance to go and study the subject of their choice."
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"It's been done in a very haphazard fashion for many years, the individual families have generally approached the ministry saying listen we have this opportunity. So we wanted to put in place a structured, coordinated process that would allow these formal organizations, these bodies to identify these student athletes, bring them to us and say listen, they have gotten partial scholarships at this university, or this community college, they need additional support on a monthly basis to assist them with living expenses, accommodation, that sort of thing and so that's where we stepped in so I'm very pleased that we were able to formalized these MOU's, I think it's an important, it's a small step, but it's an important, historic step, and I think it's a foundation that we can build upon."
"We started with a commitment of $600 monthly to these student athletes to assist them with living expenses, that came from the FFB, they suggested that amount to start with, we hope obviously to build on that and then with the Basketball Association we're starting with 30 student athletes, providing them with full tuition scholarships to high school, sixth form, university, so we want to see them go through the full stages of their education up to university, so we started with 30 and we hope to expand that each year as more and more young people learn about the program."
The MOU's were signed by president of the FFB, Sergio Chuc, and president of the BBF, Jacob Leslie.
