About 50,000 youth are set to receive entrepreneurship training to help support skills development and job creation in the country.
Under the implementation of entrepreneurship training, women would constitute about 50 percent of the beneficiary target, whilst priority would also be given to persons with disability.
The 5-year initiative is dubbed ‘Ghana Jobs and Skills Project’ (GJSP). The World Bank would provide funding and technical support for its implementation.
The Ahafo and Bono East Regional Manager of Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA), KwasiAbayieAcheampong, announced this at a forum held atKenyasi in the Ahafo Region.
The forum was organised yesterday by the GEA in partnership with Mastercard Foundation.
It was in commemoration of the 2021 International Women’s Day celebration.
Mr Acheampong said the GEA would be one of the implementing agencies of the project, indicating that the GEA under the project’s sub-component would among others, give out start-up grants to 5,000 youth who would successfully complete advanced level of training.
He described the project as one of the main forms of support for the government’s top-priority agenda of upgrading skills among the populace, create more and better quality jobs, improving job outcome for the youth.
He advised the youth, especially females to embrace the project and other interventions like YouStart to better their fortunes and contribute their quota to national development.
“Government cannot create direct employment for all and therefore imperative for the youth to explore entrepreneurship opportunities to make them productive and help reduce unemployment in society,” he said.
A lecturer at the Sunyani Technical University, Mrs Juanita Ahia Quarcoo, on her part urged women to believe in themselves and uphold the can-do-spirit in all endeavours to make them relevant and fit for leadership positions.
She observed that the era where women were relegated to the background in society was far and over, and therefore incumbent on them to eschew mediocrity and low self-esteem.
Mrs Quarcoo advised young ladies, especially those into vocational apprenticeship to remain focus and steadfast in their quest to seek better future, and avoid sexual promiscuity under the guise being means of economic survival.
In attendance at the programme were women into vocational enterprises like hairdressing, fashion designing, and catering.
FROM DANIEL DZIRASAH, KENYASI
