Millions in scholarship money available to Jamaican students

Leighton Levy, Gleaner Writer

Thousands of Jamaican students should soon be able to gain access to before-now-hard-to-find scholarship opportunities.

Four young entrepreneurs - Orlando Grant, Hugh Williams, Mario Parram and Christopher Grant - who had to endure the experience of going through college while desperately needing scholarship funding, are trying to ensure that young Jamaicans wanting to realise their dreams won't have to suffer the same fate.

It was this commonality that led to the creation of NextMove Jamaica.

"NextMove Jamaica is an online database for scholarships, grants and internships where we list all local scholarships, all the major scholarships that Jamaicans can get internationally via embassies and government agencies," said Grant. "We are also in the process of publishing a national scholarship digest, which is a book solely listing available scholarships that we will be distributing to the schools, secondary and universities by January."

Grant said the idea was to bring students and scholarship opportunities together.

"For a lot of persons, the cost of tuition is going up. There is a need. There are a lot of scholarships that are available but people are not aware of them, so we are creating a link where we find the scholarships and present to the students, or potential students, who will be in need of them," he said.

Enough scholarships

According to NextMove's partners, there are thousands of these scholarships valued at more than $100 million available to Jamaican students wishing to pursue higher education.

"We have so far gone past more than 200 pages of scholarships that are available - ranging from partial to full scholarships and from diplomas to doctorates," Grant revealed.

Some of these scholarships are available through the foreign embassies currently here in Jamaica. For example, the European Union, through programmes like Erasmus Mundus, offers scholarships to students from developing countries.

"We are now the publishers of these scholarships. We have a website, NextMoveJamaica.com, where all this information will be available to anyone," Grant said. "However, it is really a membership-based site but, at this time, it is free while we create awareness."

NextMove is primarily funded by donations, contributions and revenues generated from advertisements on the website, and employs a very rigorous fund-raising campaign to help support its services and bring the resources to where they are needed the most - the students.

For information about sponsorship and advertisement placements, contact NextMove at either info@nextmoveja.com or www.nextmoveja.com.

There are thousands of these scholarships valued at more than $100m available to Jamaicans.