- Ian Allen/Staff Photographer
General manager of Churches Cooperative Credit Union, Basil Naar.

Five students from three Jamaican universities were offered credit union grants of $250,000 each to finance start-up of their own businesses.

The students were presented with the funds by Churches Cooperative Credit Union , under its Young Entrepreneurs Award programme.

The awardees were Nathalee Dixon of Northern Caribbean University who plans launch Dixon's Creation and Crafts; Jodi-Kaye Smith of the University of the West Indies, who says she will establish Fashionable Yet Honourable Limited; and a group of three students from the University of Technology, Janet Patrice Johnson, Natahlia Robinson and Devon Dewdney - who will partner on a restaurant to be called Food Express.

The five will be mentored by businessman Elon Beckford, chairman of KS Chemicals Distributors Limited.

At the awards ceremony, which was held on July 25 at the Courtleigh Hotel in New Kingston, the general manager of Churches Credit Union, Basil Naar, said that the aim of the awards is to encourage entrepreneurship among university students who, because of the lack of job opportunities, often opt to migrate.

"I believe that the cultivation of the 'entrepreneurial imagination' is the single most important contribution university business schools can make to the business community," said Naar.

Instead of "vocationalising" business and management programmes, said Naar, business schools should adopt an educational structure which promotes and stimulates the entrepreneurial imagination.

It is an approach that requires a radical shift in instruction that cultivates, he said, a mentality that leads to the fomenting of ideas.

Naar warned the students not to become entrepreneurs if they had no passion for business.

"In your darker moments, it is the mission-driven spirit which passion brings that will carry you through," he said.