Banana Sector Retraining Project information

The Banana Sector Retraining Project was a program run by the HEART Trust/NTA during 2008 and 2009. It aimed to retrain displaced workers and farmers in the banana/plantain industry and those whose jobs may disappear because of loss of preferential treatment in the European market. It was implemented in the six traditional banana-growing parishes: St. James, St. Catherine, St. Thomas, St. Mary, Portland and Clarendon.

The project was a small-scale pilot. It did not provide jobs directly for people and was not used to influence changes to the banana/plantain sector, but its findings and outcomes were intended to help inform and develop a larger scale programme of assistance to workers in Jamaica's banana/plantain communities. What they learnt and the experiences of participants in the project were intended also to help inform the design of training and certification programmes to be implemented by HEART Trust/NTA^[1] (and/or other institutions) in the future.