And so, while these employees must figure out how they will budget their termination earnings until they find work, primary school children around the city have been practicing financial prudence.
It's part of a dedicated and longstanding program by Price Waterhouse Coopers, Peacework, and the Ministry of Education, to teach the next generation about how to be entrepreneurs.
Today, after 2 weeks of training the children, they held a business fair to see how well the students could translate the concepts of financial literacy into actual realistic businesses.
7News dropped by the displays to see how well they've learned spend money responsibly:
Tanisha Myers - Teacher, St. John's Anglican School
"It's geared at teaching about financial literacy - we know that in today's day and age and in Belizean families on a whole - they don't know a lot about budgeting. When we think about budgeting, we think about having our pay check last from this month to the next without anything saved in between. So this camp is geared at making our children be more business savvy and to be more conscious and aware of how to budget their monies."
Mitchell Roschelle - Representative, PWC
"This is the second year that we've been doing a two week program where six schools this week and seven schools last week all across Belize City and that's just a part of what we're doing. In addition there's a program to teach principals how to teach financial literacy and how to teach teachers how to teach financial literacy as well as working with some of the high school scholars on a scholarship programs that PWC is endowed"
Nina Oconnor - Representative, PWC
"This is the third day - it's sort of a culmination of three days worth of teaching them various concepts with financial literacy and so this is really just brining those concepts together and having them think through on how to save, what a budget is and all things to have a successful business and being able to sustain that going forward and they did an amazing job of coming up with all different types of concepts where they can go out and actually make money."
Melanie Bennett-Castro - Teacher, Wesley Upper School
"They were very receptive and they learnt a lot and I also hope that in the future they will really use these ideas with what they have learned so that it could build our country of Belize. We do need entrepreneurs in our country at this time."
Ibrahim Bengali - Representative, PWC
"It's interesting that a lot of them got the concept very easily, if you say words like 'inflows and outflows and entrepreneur financial literacy' they have no idea what going on. If you tell them, 'if I give you ten Belizean dollars - what do you do with it?' Somebody would say I would spend it on a basketball and someone says I'll save it. Then you start asking what will you save it for, what are the things in the future that you look for, whether it's high school or buying something later on. Once they start understanding that concept that it's broken down like that for them then you really hold on to it so if you ask anyone in our class - 'what would you do with ten Belizean dollars - we'll put it in the bank.'"
Lia Flur - Representative, PWC
"At the end of the three days they put together a business plan and now have their idea of creating their own business. So they understand now about savings, entrepreneurship and what kind of expenses they need and that's kind of the way we judge and whether or not they grasped the concept. We also are now implementing a PWC store on Thursday morning before they leave and that's an opportunity for past participants to show their work and the business that they've actually put into action."
The business fair was held at 6 different sites: St. Martin De Porres, St. Luke's, Queen Square, St. John's, St. John's Vianney and James Garbutt.
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