Day: April 27, 2023

Mr Hamidu Adakurugu, Director, Finance and Administration of the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relation says government is committed towards creating enabling environment to promote decent and sustainable jobs for all.

He said this could be undertaken through Public-Private-Partnership (PPP), which would be a critical tool to help address the unemployment challenges faced by the youth in the country.

Mr Adakurugu made the remark at a closeout meeting of the Pathways for Sustainable Employment for Women and Youth in Ghana (PASEWAY) Project in Accra.

The PASEWAY project is an initiative by Plan International Ghana and the Plan International Germany, which had helped to provide employable skills to over 4,000 young women and men in the construction and the hospitality sectors in Greater Accra, Ashanti, and the Northern Regions.

It was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Mr Adakurugu said the PPP could help bridge the skills gap by providing training opportunities that match the skills required in the job market; create job opportunities through the provision of resources, funding and guidance to start-ups, small-medium enterprises, and social enterprises.

Others were the promotion of entrepreneurship, access to finance and business support services that would encourage young people to become entrepreneurs; and increase access to information on available job opportunities, leveraging technology and social media to connect young people with potential employers.

He said government was also committed to increasing access to technical and vocational education and training (TVET) to assist emerging youth with valuable skills that were in high demand, while increasing their chances of gaining employment or starting their own businesses.

The Director advised the beneficiaries of the PASEWAY project to use the skills and knowledge acquired to do more and aspire for greater things, saying; ‘You are the future of our nation, and we are counting on you to help us build a better Ghana.’

Mr Adakurugu urged stakeholders to continue to support government’s efforts to providing employment for the youth and all other Ghanaians of working age.

‘Let us work together in creating more opportunities for our young people and to help them achieve their full potential. Together, we can build a stronger and more prosperous Ghana.’

Source: Ghana News Agency

A Supreme Court Judge, Justice Professor Henrietta Joy Abena Nyarko Mensa-Bonsu says Ghana must nurture resilience against any situation that has the potential to create division, thus compromising the peace and stability of the country.

‘Ghana must nurture a tolerable degree of resilience to withstand any form of stress that will break up its sense of unity and invite war mongers, human vultures and despicable characters from changing our way of life in favour of commercial profits for themselves,’ she said.

At the annual Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lecture organised as part of the 75th Anniversary celebrations of the University of Ghana, held on the theme: Resilience, Technology and Humanism, Justice Mensa-Bonsu said some of Ghana’s neighbours which experienced such conflicts were still battling the herculean task of recovering and rebuilding after years of chaos and instability due to the lack of resilience.

She also touched on how these armed conflicts compromised law and order, the safety of citizens and created an atmosphere of survival difficulties for the majority ordinary citizens caught in it.

The Supreme Court Judge, therefore, suggested the urgent need for the country to take practical steps to avoid such outcomes from occurring.

‘It is therefore not a matter of idle interest for Ghana to survey its geographical location to determine what it will take to stay off such a fate and what it must take its attention in cultivating sufficient resilience to maintain its territorial integrity,’ she said.

Citing some data from the 2021 population census, she pointed to existing vulnerabilities such as increasing urban poverty, growing inequalities and youth unemployment which she said created an atmosphere to breed such armed conflicts.

This situation, she also noted, could never insulate the country from external threats such as the advancement of the Islamist insurgency from the Sahel, hence the need to properly tackle these social and economic vulnerabilities.

‘It has also been demonstrated that sustainable and equitable development in the country is a necessary condition for durable peace. For when development is enjoyed as a peace dividend, the corporation of the population to maintain the peace is assured,’ she said.

She also highlighted the need to intentionally cultivate peace and nature habits that would ‘see us through a dangerous time in our history.’

‘I have always maintained that peace is to a nation what oxygen is to the human being…Without peace, the only thing will be survival and certainly, no development,’ she said.

Source: Ghana News Agency