NYA to support gov’t employ more youth

NYA to support gov’t employ more youth

By Mohammed Awal

Ras Mubarak

The National Co-Ordinator of the National Youth Authority (NYA), Ras Mubarak, has disclosed that the authority would soon roll out "the youth entrepreneurship competition" to help absorb some of the challenges the government is grappling with in giving the youth employment.

According to him, the Authority would invite proposals or bids from the youth, after which an independent team would be established to screen these proposals and select the best five, among the lot.

The five best proposals would be given a seed capital of GH¢100, 000 to materialize their vision. According to him, in view of the souring nature of youth unemployment, one of the surest ways to reduce unemployment would be to "encourage a lot of the youth to start their own businesses."

Mr. Mubarak divulged this to the media in Accra, on Tuesday, this week, at a conference to officially re-launch the NYA's website. He noted that as a facilitating agency, they should be seen at the forefront helping the youth to achieve their dreams.

Mr. Mubarak told The Chronicle in an interview that the competition would be launched in September this year and that the winners announced in December, same year.

Bedrock of development

The youth, he stated, are the "bedrock of the country's development" and that they should be engaged productively. Failure to harness their talent and energies towards productivity, he noted, could spell doom for the country's peace.

"If this young people are not engaged, it will pose a threat to our very democracy and that is why we should all become stakeholders in making sure that we help build the youth of our country."

He, therefore, appealed to the banks and government to fashion out a way where they could guarantee loans for these start-up businesses so that the youth could venture into entrepreneurship.

International time- bomb

Rising youth unemployment is one of the deepest economic and social problems facing economies the world over. The phenomena is increasingly considered an ‘international time-bomb’ for both developed and developing nations alike.

Youth unemployment, as at 2013, stands at over 75 million people worldwide. And the youth are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said.

The ILO further noted that of all the determinants of unemployment over the past three years, age has been the most significant – more than geography, education level and gender.
It again indicated that in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the high employment-to-population ratios of youth in the poorest regions show far more young people stuck in circumstances of working poverty than are without work or looking for work.
Ghana has no comprehensive statistics on its labour market. Many experts say this situation has hampered the accurate assessment of the labour market while government’s policies and programmes directed at improving the labour force in the country have not yielded the expected results.