Foundation's Kareem Bynoe was so impressive driving home his points that CSME ads were not reaching out to the young people that he won over Andrea Symmonds, Chief Research Officer for CSME in the Prime Minister's Office.

THERE IS an advertisement that tells Barbadians the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) is for you, CSME is for me but it seems as if something gets lost in transmission when young people hear it.

At least this is the view of some 35 students from Foundation School and Garrison Secondary School.

The students made their feelings known during a group discussion on Friday at the CARI YOUTH Symposium, CSME: Connecting Through Bajan Flying Fish And Grenadian Spices held at Foundation School in Christ Church.

"We are not going to work. All we hear about is jobs, jobs, jobs.

"We aren't looking for jobs right now. How does this affect us now? What does it have to do with us?", asked Foundation student Ramon Lorde.

Lorde and the other students said they felt as if the Government was specifically targeting adults with all the advertisements and lectures on the CSME and were forgetting young people in the process.

"Government has not done enough to inform the youth about CSME; and to tell you the truth, if it wasn't for CARI YOUTH, I wouldn't know anything about CSME," said Hayden Alleyne a student of Garrison Secondary.

While admitting that Government needed to do more to make the concepts of CSME known to young people, Andrea Symmonds, chief research officer for the CSME in the Prime Minister's Office, challenged the students to go look for the information themselves.

"You must not, as young people, expect that you are going to be given every single piece of information," Symmonds told the students.

She encouraged them to go after information on the CSME the same way they would the latest Sizzla song.

"Whether an issue is topical or not, if it is something you feel that you need to have the information on, you will find a way to get that information," she added.

However, Foundation student Gillian Rowe, said that part of the problem was that the information currently available was not easily accessible or digestible.

"Are we there yet? Are we at the point where there is the information out there for us if we wanted it? I think they talk about CSME and make it sound technical, but we are at a point where we don't know what to make of it," Rowe said.

Matthew Farley, principal of Garrison Secondary, who also participated in the symposium, told the students not to restrict their searches to just the CSME.

"Look at other groupings like the European Union, who are doing similar things to what we are trying to do here. You have to become proactive," Farley said.