Jabez House

Jabez House was founded by Shamelle Rice as the only organisation of its kind in Barbados offering alternative economic opportunities through skills development and empowerment to female sex workers. Shamelle’s initial work focused on HIV and human trafficking, but she quickly realised that a major factor contributing to increased rates of sex work was economic vulnerability and that no one was offering female sex workers an alternative.
Shamelle remembers the One Young World Summit in Bangkok vividly, and seeing so many other young people from across the world with visions as big as hers inspired her with an even greater desire to press on with Jabez House. The Summit also impacted the nature of her vision for the organisation, she learned more about the social enterprise model and began thinking about how she could implement it in her own work. Over the years, Jabez House has helped women transition out of sex work by offering free training courses where women can immediately learn skills that open new employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for them.
Through community outreach, Jabez House has provided 550 female sex workers with the commodities they need to work safely. Around 220 women have gone through its training programmes so far, with the vast majority of these women having transitioned out of sex work completely or cut their involvement significantly. As most of these women are mothers, Jabez House has expanded its efforts to provide school supplies and basic needs assistance like food, clothing, and in some cases housing, to affected children. Since COVID-19, they have focused more on digital empowerment and workshops with female entrepreneurs to ensure that the transitioning process can continue.
"Going to the One Young World Summit and hearing the different sessions, expertise, hearts, it impacted me in a way that caused my worldview, horizon, and everything to be so much bigger than they would have been had I not gone"