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The Chief Executive Officer of the National Youth Authority (NYA), Pius Enam Hadzide, has urged the youth to take advantage of the government’s entrepreneurship development initiative, dubbed YouStart, to enable them to create their own businesses.
He said through that, they could also help create jobs while developing themselves.
Mr Hadzide made the call at a stakeholders’ engagement held in Accra yesterday[June 21, 2022] to share some insights on the YouStart programme.
He said although other employment interventions introduced in the past could arguably be labelled as unsuccessful, the YouStart had been designed to be a game-changer that would succeed.
That, he said, was because the government, together with stakeholders, had reviewed previous programmes and put together the right packages.
Mr Hadzide, therefore, urged the youth to leverage the initiative, saying it would enable them to become job creators while developing their capacity to contribute to the development of the nation.
“We are recommending it to all young persons to take advantage to develop and become job givers instead of job seekers to contribute to the economy,” he said.
He said the initiative would focus heavily on the training of young people with viable business ideas to develop successful business ethics, as well as good values such as patriotism for national development.
Mr Hadzide added that the programme would use creative means to bridge the gap between young entrepreneurs and financing by making available essential inputs such as machinery to help them survive.
The Coordinator for YouStart, Andy Amedson, who represented a Deputy Minister of Finance, Dr John Kumah, said the policy was intended to reduce the economy’s over-dependence on foreign inflows and foreign direct investments by creating a minimum of one million jobs in three years.
He added that the YouStart initiative would coordinate various economic policies put in place by the government which included NaBCo, Youth Employment Agency and the one-district, one-factory among others.
For his part, the CEO of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP), Kofi Ofosu Nkansah, said although youth unemployment was an issue, it could become a huge potential for development if harnessed properly.
