Photo: Dr. Leroy Almendarez, Executive Director of BELTRAIDE, with Susanne Jensen, Country Director of Humana —People to People Belize
by Charles Gladden
BELLA VISTA, Toledo, Fri. June 9, 2023
In partnership with the Government of Belize along with the Belize Trade and Investment Development Service (BELTRAIDE) comes the fourth Digital Connect Center in Bella Vista, Toledo, which was officially launched on Thursday, June 8.
The project was taken on through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which financially supported the Building Resilient MSME’s Accelerating Digitization Project with an estimated 360,000 USD in partnership with the HUMANA People to People Belize.
The brand-new Digital Connect Center will provide free access to computers and digital learning opportunities which will bridge the digital gap for the residents of the area who are desperately in need of technological services.
There will be four desktop computers and an internet connection at the center, which will be an asset to HUMANA’s Community Hub in the surrounding areas and will aid training in entrepreneurial development, business innovation, and competitiveness for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME). It will also be used to provide access to digital literacy training for unskilled youths, women, the unemployed, migrants, and the elderly.
“This is an opportunity on how do we support the livelihoods in Belize,” said Ian King, Deputy Resident Representative of Belize, UNDP. “This initiative emerged initially out of COVID. So, COVID illustrated to us the disparities that different communities faced, and we saw the digital divide in schoolchildren; but we also saw it with businesses where we recognized that many MSMEs, with restrictions of movement, the dependency that they had with the direct engagement they had with their customers and suppliers, all of that was lost. The ability to market their interface was lost,” he added.
“We’re also here looking at the fact that if we don’t bridge the digital divide, then there are those who will be left out of the discourse, and that’s not something that we want,” said Dr. Leroy Almendarez, Executive Director of BELTRAIDE.
The Community Hub in Bella Vista is the fourth out of six to be created.