A total of 328 apprentices, mainly young women, received business start-up kits at the weekend, after undergoing six months apprenticeship training in the Yendi municipality of the Northern Region.
The beneficiaries were trained in hairdressing, dressmaking, weaving, make-up, baking, soap making, barbering, leather works, carpentry, and masonry and were given tailoring machines, wheel barrows, hair dryers, bakery oven machines, cylinders, barbering machines, hand saw and hammers.
The training was the initiative of the Member of Parliament (MP) for Yendi, Alhaji Farouk Aliu Mahama, with support from the Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA) and Mastercard Foundation through Business In A Box (BizBox) Project.
Distributing the kits to the beneficiaries at a ceremony here in Yendi, Alhaji Mahama said the initiative would empower the youth, especially the young girls and women to ensure that their future career prospects were secured.
“It is also at the core of my New Yendi City Projects focused on rolling back frontiers of poverty in the Yendi Municipality. Despite the recent decrease in our unemployment rate due to more concerted efforts, admittedly the figures remain high and it is for this reason this apprenticeship programme is important to us,” he said.
Alhaji Mahama said, through his efforts to deal with the challenges, he had been able to place more than 1000 youth in various sectors into various youth employment programmes.
He said a Labour Employment Centre had been established at the Yendi Assembly for the youth to benefit from high-quality work readiness Programmes.
The MP stated that through the initiative of his office, a digital skills training was created with the intentions of helping the youth to leverage opportunities associated with electronic-commerce.
He said he would continue to roll out pro-poor programmes to provide relief to many of their households in the entire municipality.
This, according to him, as an active MP he would continue to be busy trying to address all issues of the youth, both formally educated and skills educated.
He said the distribution of the kits to the beneficiaries was another evidence of their efforts to make a positive impact on the people he served.
The MP, however, advised them to take anything that they were doing seriously in their field of study.
The Northern Regional Director of the GEA, Mr Mathew Azoya, said their outfit facilitated the creation of over 109,471 jobs with 67 per cent benefiting women across the country.
The manager said empowering the youth was an ideal way for them to learn a trade and be economically independent on their own.
The Yendi Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), Alhaji Abubakar Ahmed Yussif, said the government remained steadfast in its commitment to providing dignified and sustainable employment opportunities for the youth of this country.
Alhaji Yussif called on them to be serious with what they had learnt, improve upon it and also adopt the best practices to market their products or businesses.
A beneficiary, Ms Sulemana Asana, thanked the MP, GEA and Mastercard Foundation for the support and assured them that they would leverage the skills to improve their lives, and that of their families and communities
FROM YAHAYA NUHU NADAA, YENDI