Youth Training and Employment Partnership Programme (YTEPP), and its shrinking enrolment
Trinidad and Tobago's YTEPP Limited, the state company that trains people aged 15 to 35 who are out of work or school, enrolled 1,601 persons in October 2024 to June 2025, 61 percent of its target, against 2,301 trainees in the Youth Training Programme over the same October to June window of 2019-20, according to the Ministry of Finance's Social Sector Investment Programme reviews.
1,601 persons, persons enrolled in ytepp youth training and employment programmes, October 2024 to June 2025. 2,301 trainees, trainees enrolled in the ytepp youth training programme, same months five years earlier (ssip 2021), October 2019 to June 2020. Ministry of Finance, Trinidad and Tobago, Social Sector Investment Programme 2026, chapter 3B Review of Social Programmes, Ministry of Tertiary Education and Skills Training, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The state funds a training company that runs short vocational and life-skills courses in centres across both islands for young people outside work and school, and reports enrolment against a yearly target in the budget's social sector review.
Preconditions
- A recurrent transfer from the budget, which in a hydrocarbon economy moves with energy revenue
- Training centres spread across districts, including Tobago
- A national vocational qualification (CVQ/NEC) that short courses can certify against
Where else it has been used: Caribbean youth training agencies founded in the 1980s (HEART in Jamaica, YTEPP in Trinidad and Tobago) share the design. YTEPP depends on a yearly budget transfer that fell after 2016, while Jamaica's levy-financed HEART reported growing enrolment (jam-heart-nsta).
Limits: Both counts are the ministry's own programme reporting, collected in budget documents. The earlier figure is in a different edition, Social Sector Investment Programme 2021 (https://www.finance.gov.tt/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Social-Sector-Investment-Programme-2021-1.pdf), and the two may not count the same thing: 2021 counts trainees in the Youth Training Programme, 2026 counts persons in 'youth training and employment programmes', and 2026 separately reports 1,323 youths in CVQ/TVET, NEC or YTEPP-certified programmes. 2019-20 is not a demonstrated peak; it is the earliest comparable count found, and its window already includes the first COVID-19 closures from March 2020, so the true fall is probably larger. The money moved the same way: the SSIP 2017 table gives an estimate of TT$111 million for YTEPP in 2016, SSIP 2019 gives TT$64.4 million actual spending in 2017, and SSIP 2026 lists TT$41.4 million, but transfers between ministries make those columns hard to align, so they are context, not the metric. The programme serves ages 15 to 35, so part of it is young people just out of school rather than adults returning to learning. Enrolment is not completion. The 1988 start is YTEPP's founding year as commonly reported; it was not read at the cited source.