The Jamaica Customs Agency (JCA) has donated 60 tablets valued at $1.2 million to two primary schools in St. James and St. Andrew.
The institutions are Farm Primary and Infant in Green Pond and Edward Seaga Primary in Denham Town, which were presented with 30 tablets each on September 8 and September 9, respectively.
Director of Internal Affairs at the JCA and Chairperson of the Agency’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Committee, Tameka Goulbourne, told JIS News that the funds used to purchase the devices came from personal donations by employees.
The devices were purchased according to specifications given by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information.
Ms. Goulbourne said that the CSR Committee focuses its efforts in and around communities where the JCA’s offices are located.
“We have community locations in Montego Bay and our head office and other Customs locations are not very far from Edward Seaga Primary, so we engage the schools that are within our reach, within our own communities, to see how best we can assist them,” she said.
Noting the genesis of the CSR programme, Ms. Goulbourne said “we wanted to have a greater impact on our stakeholders beyond our current mandate, especially with everything that has been going on. We are experiencing unprecedented times, so we made the decision to establish a programme with this in mind”.
She noted that a big part of the programme’s objective is to meet the needs of specific vulnerable groups, such as children and persons in need of assistance.
“With the current initiative, we launched a tablet drive within the agency where we invited members of the organisation to donate and give towards a worthy cause, and it was so good,” Ms. Goulbourne said.
“We identified the two primary schools, and we partnered with them because since the pandemic there are quite a number of students who have not really been in school or been consistent in school, because they don’t have proper devices to use to be able to access their classes. So, we decided to give some assistance to these schools,” she noted.