Since it took office in January 2017, the Akufo-Addo administration has been introducing initiatives to address particularly youth unemployment in the country, including the Business and Employment Assistance Programme (BEAP), the latest youth initiative.
Coming as one of the flagship programmes of the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), the BEAP aims to nurture young entrepreneurs, empowering them to create employment opportunities for the large pool of unemployed youth in the country.
The Ghanaian youth have many challenges, which dim their hopes of a bright future and so initiatives that give them ray of hope must be applauded and supported to survive.
We know that there have been challenges with some of the youth initiatives so far pursued.
For instance, there have been challenges with allowances paid the youth such as their meagerness and delayed payment, as well as the limited number of beneficiaries as it was the case with the YouStart programme.
The YouStart was piloted with 70 beneficiaries with the promise that the initiative will be enhanced to effectively assist more youth-led businesses in the coming years.
However, we see the BEAP as giving some ray of hope because of what it has to offer by way of a departure from the previous initiatives and their challenges, yet not dismissing the possibility of it having its own problems though.
For instance, a sum of GH¢120 million has been earmarked for BEAP and it is anticipated that it would benefit 10,000 MSMEs and 20,000 young Ghanaians.
What is exciting about it all is that each of the beneficiary MSMEs is expected to engage a maximum of five employees, who will be given a monthly allowance of GH¢ 500 to top up their regular salary for one year, which is a crucial support for businesses to recover and expand.
Even though businesses in the country had their own challenges, the emergence of COVID-19 and its disruption of businesses worsened the situation, with some businesses either laying off workers or being unable to employ additional workers.
There are still others reducing wages or refusing to increase them in spite of rising prices of goods and services that have eroded the value of earnings.
The BEAP is, therefore, a saviour of some sort as it comes in to reduce unemployment and increase earnings.
We only hope that everything would go as planned so that the expectation of the country’s youth would not be cut off.
While we say that, we wish to appeal to the beneficiary businesses to not stop paying their youthful employees because of the GH¢500 allowance given them under BEAP.
We are saying this because of mistreatment given to young workers at certain workplaces to the extent that some are not paid for months and when they raise issue with it, they are branded as bad persons and dismissed or punished in other ways.
Therefore, we want to express the firmest of hopes that the government will monitor and check such instances and make the BEAP the good initiative that it has been planned to be.
That way, we believe, it can cause better successor initiatives to be born just as we believe it is better than its predecessors.
