Youth Agricultural Summer Internship Programme (YASIP) Hailed a Success!
The 2025 Youth Agricultural Summer Internship Programme (YASIP) has this year benefitted 43 interns with 65% of them hoping to pursue a career in agriculture.
YASIP is an initiative led by the Zero Hunger Trust Fund (ZHTF) and aims to provide recent secondary school and college graduates with the opportunity to engage in hands-on training in sustainable agriculture.
Interns gained valuable hands-on experience in integrated farm management, greenhouse and shade-house techniques, water harvesting, solar technology, agribusiness, animal husbandry, and policy and strategy development among other areas.
Speaking at the closing ceremony of the 2025 YASIP at the National Insurance Services (NIS) conference room on Tuesday, August 26th, Chief Executive Officer of the ZHTF Safiya Horne-Bique, noted that the 43 interns who successfully completed this year’s six-week program is the largest YASIP cohort to date.
“Today, we celebrate not just closing the program, but the seeds of transformation that have been planted in our communities, in our agriculture sector, and most importantly, in the minds and futures of our young people,” Horne-Debique said.
She said the program was impactful as 65% of interns expressed a serious interest in pursuing a career in agriculture while there was an 85% satisfaction rate reported among interns and host partners. Three host partners indicated intentions to retain interns in part-time or seasonal roles.
Horne-Bique also praised host partners for their active mentorship and for introducing interns to innovative agricultural technologies, fostering a new generation of farmers, ‘agripreneurs’, and agri-scientists.
The CEO also announced that looking ahead, the ZHTF plans to, in 2026, expand placements to 20 host partners while welcoming additional schools, including the Girls’ High School (GHS), which recently introduced agriculture at the Form Four level.
It is also the ZHTF’s hope to strengthen ties with the Youth in Agriculture Network (YAN) in an effort to do, among other things, ensure mentorship beyond the program while they are also hoping to launch a micro-grant program to support youth-led agricultural projects.
Horne-Bique stressed that agriculture is not a fallback but a foundation while noting that it is not just about crops and animals, but science, technology, entrepreneurship, and national resilience.
She told interns that they are the future of food security in SVG while she expressed gratitude to the SVG Conservation Fund, which partnered with ZHTF for the second consecutive year to fund YASIP.
The internship program, which was first launched in 2023, also aims to empower youths and promote innovation within the agriculture sector. YASIP 2025 began on July 10th, and placed interns between the ages of 16 and 24 with 18 host partners across St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), including for the first time in Union Island.
The closing ceremony also heard from interns Maurice Henry and Chazz Cruickshank and host partners Kezembe Miguel and Hermie Bute among others.
Bute encouraged interns to take agriculture and farming as a job while Miguel said he was glad to be able to host the interns.
