The Vice President, Alhaji Dr Mahammudu Bawumia, has outlined 15 broad areas his government will focus on when elected the President in the next generation elections.
Dubbed: ‘Bold Solutions for the Future of our Country,’ the initiatives focused on innovation, agriculture, youth employment, digitalisation, technology and vocational training.
Speaking to Ghanaians on his vision yesterday at the University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA) in Accra Wednesday, Dr Bawumia said he was going to lead a digital revolution with the goal of training one million digital talents.
He said his government would harness the innovative talent of Ghanaians as part of his transformative vision for the country.
Dr Bawumia said his vision would in addition apply technology to transform key sectors of the economy including agriculture, healthcare, education and manufacturing.
He said he aimed to also build the digital talents Ghana needed for the global digital revolution with plans to train at least 200,000 youth per year on digital software skills.
“I want to see Ghana build the digital talent we require for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This will mean providing digital and software skills to hundreds of thousands of youth. In collaboration with the private sector, we will train at least 200,000 youth per year for the next five years. This, along with other policies, will create jobs for the youth, including school dropouts.”
In addition he said “I also want to enhance the repositioning of the education system towards STEM, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and vocational skills to cope with the demands of the fourth Industrial Revolution and job creation. In collaboration with the private sector, we will aim to train at least 1,000,000 software developers in five years (200,000 per year). As software developers. They will have job opportunities worldwide.”
Dr Bawumia, who is also the flagbearer of the NPP, again said he was confident that the Ghanaian had the talent and what it would take to be number one in the world in many areas.
He however, stated these were often derailed by pessimism and impossibility mindsets; adding that his government would champion the mindset of possibilities in order to bring out the best from every Ghanaian.
“I want to encourage Ghanaians to have a mindset of possibilities and not impossibilities,” he underlined.
“The challenges we must overcome as a country are too important to let our political differences derail us. There is a critical failure of mindset that manifests itself in the absence of core values, patriotism and principles within our society. We need to invigorate the can do spirit of the Ghanaian to believe that we can even do better than the advanced countries if we put our minds to it.”
“For example, our students from Mamfe Girls and Prempeh College have won international robotic competitions against their peers in the US, Germany and South Korea. We have to apply the same mindset of beating the world in robotics, sing-a-thons and cook-a-thons to every sphere of activity. We must believe it is possible.
“This must be inculcated in our children from school. This is why we are going to introduce a growth mindset curriculum to help students build critical skills such us problem solving, risk taking, opportunity spotting and design thinking.”
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
