President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, yesterday launched a project geared towards youth employment generation in the country.
Dubbed: ‘Youth in Agriculture for Sustainable Employment,’ the project which is being implemented by the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) is expected to generate permanent jobs for about 200,000 youth across the country.
As part of the project, youth who sign on to the project will be supported with land, farm inputs, crop seeds, fertiliser, and irrigation system at no cost but will be expected to pay back in kind after harvesting of their crops.
In addition, the government through MOFA will support with plant protection chemicals and mechanisation services.
The crops selected under the project include maize, rice, soya, and each of the 200,000 beneficiaries will be expected to cultivate about 10acres of land.
Launching the project at the University of Ghana Campus in Accra, yesterday, the President said it was important to stress that sustaining Ghana’s agriculture depended on the youth.
He said the youth were obviously the future of this country as such we needed to count on their vibrancy, fresh ideas, and innovation to improve our collect fortune.
Nana Akufo-Addo said agriculture which was a major sector of the economy awaited the participation of the youth both educated and uneducated.
He said the country was blessed with huge material wealth and vibrant human resources which remained largely untapped, however, the country could only make progress if it paid attention to this.
The President noted that the Asian tigers such as Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, were where they are today because of the investment they made in the development of their human capital.
“Their period of boom and growth happened when their population shifted from ones of many dependants to ones dominated by working age groups and this is where Africa and indeed Ghana is today,” he emphasised.
The President said it was for this reason that over the last six years, his government had invested in programmes such as the FSHS policy, STEM education, free TVET, the No guarantor policy, the modernisation and retooling of the Ghana Library Authority, the Nation Builders Corp, National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme and investment in sport infrastructure and creation of numerous avenues for the youth under the initial phase of the PFJ in 2017.
On his part, the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Bryan Acheampong said he was inspired by the response of the youth towards the project which focused on youth employment in agriculture.
He said the project had been placed under a component under the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs Programme.
Dr Acheampng explained that the PFJ was a strategic intervention to continuously improve on the levels of Ghana’s food self-sufficiency for selected communities for organised production using an input credit system and aggregation modules.
He said the programme sought to ensure that the country became food secure within the plan implementation period of five years, adding that “we are firm and believe that Ghana will be food secure and resilient in five years.”
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
