It has become almost cliché to say that Barbados has very few resources apart from its human capital and the island’s natural beauty. Those two have been combined as critical inputs in sustaining our main economic driver – tourism.Buttressing our human resources has been our educational system, which is largely supported by a public policy in which tax payers shoulder the cost whether the recipients are from wealthy families, or they are from dirt poor origins.The majority of Barbadians have come from working-class backgrounds where poverty was a fact of life, a pit toilet was a shared experience, and hand-me-downs were common among siblings.A lot of that has changed for the current generation. Though most young Barbadians in the “gen zers” population - born between 1997 and 2012 - are likely to be showering by solar water heaters, have probably never seen, far less used a pit toilet, and have been binging on smartphone technology and tablets since they were toddlers, an estimated 20 to 25 per cent of Barbadians are still in poverty.
