News:
April 24, 2019
Member of Parliament for Anlo, Clement Kofi Humado has said the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission is putting in place measures to tackle youth unemployment in the sub-region.
According to the Anlo lawmaker and a representative of Ghana to the community Parliament, certain governments within the sub-region have not put in place institutional arrangements to deal with issues of accessing finance.
“Unemployed youth are getting desperate and a lot of them are getting across to Europe, with high mortality along the way and has become a disgrace to governments in West Africa, as unemployment has reduce the youth to taking such perishable journeys”, he lamented.
He made this remarks after attending two joint delocalized meetings of the ECOWAS Parliament in Guinea Conakry, where committee on Education Science and Technology and Information Technology met for this meeting.
Mr. Clement Kofi Humado further added that, the theme: (Add the theme) was relevant because, it touched on contributions of Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs) to reducing unemployment particularly among the youth in West Africa.
“Sixty percent of our populations are youth, if you add the children they are seventy percent of our population, a large section of this youth are unemployed meanwhile we have the potentials of creating jobs”. This is what the ECOWAS commissions want to tackle head on all fronts and the immediate target group is the SMEs.
“Due to lack of capital we cannot rely on, heavy industries to generate these jobs for our youths, some of these heavy industries are using labor serving devices to work, the area we think we can make impact is with the SMEs that produce hand crafts, small machines”.
In Ghana for example SMEs contribute fifty-five (55) percent of the National Gross Domestic Product GDP that is SMEs in Agriculture, Trade and Industry together they contribute about 55 percent of the GDP most of them are not identified and recognised because they belong to the informal sector.
“Our trip to Guinea Conakry, we sought to know from them if government itself had put policies in place to promote SMEs, and try to look at various countries in the sub-region. We brought resource persons to speak on the subject matter”.
He further added that Ministers and Chief Directors from their host country, came to speak on measures put in place to address the youth unemployment likewise a resource person from the Commission, “it was an interesting meeting”, he said.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/ghanamps.com