Executive Chairman of Cool Group of companies, Joe Issa, says he believes in promoting education because it is the surest way out of poverty, the scourge of all societies.
Issa, who has established charities as a conduit for giving back, has focused on education as it opens up opportunities for gainful employment, which provides the necessities for daily living – food, clothing and shelter.
However, he cautions that sometimes, depending on how enabling the business environment is, more is needed, such as a good education, creativity and imagination or even retraining in order to break completely, the cycle of poverty.
“Yes! Literacy and numeracy will take you somewhere in terms of getting a job, but you may not even need to be able to read, write and count for these low-paying jobs, such as digging holes and filling them back. And when all the holes have been dug and filled, what next is left to do? And that’s when the cookie crumbles.
“So, numeracy and literacy have their uses, such as in functionality: enabling you to follow directions in traveling, dosages in dispensing medicine, recipes in cooking and applications in using agricultural chemicals, etc. But beyond these, the mere ability to read, write and count is woefully inadequate,” says Issa.
In 1987, Issa founded “Educate the Children Fund to buy books for disadvantaged children in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean and a year later, he established the “Joe Issa/Holy Cross Scholarship Fund” to send students to university.
He describes a good education as one that does not merely enable school leavers to get a decent entry level job, but one which allows them to matriculate to higher education, such as college and university and get a profession.
As a civic-minded philanthropist who has hosted youth camps and disadvantaged children in the communities in which his businesses operate, Issa believes that schools must be progressive in order to churn out university-ready children.
With this in mind, he founded “Global Education 2000”, which has twined Jamaican schools with their counterparts in the United States. Several schools have benefited from these exchanges, including Three Hills All Age School in St. Mary, which was twinned with Broward Elementary School in Tampa, Florida.
Issa, who was pleased with the idea, said it’s a “major development which will see an exciting, rewarding exchange of cultural ideas and thoughts between students and teachers at both institutions.”
“Much of who I am today is due to my good fortune of having been able to access a good education and I wish nothing less for all Jamaican children,” Issa says.
Joe Issa Champions for Education 