News:
April 29, 2025
Ghana’s Minister for Youth Development and Empowerment George Opare Addo is advocating for the youthful energies of the sub-regional population to be turned into a positive development by equipping the youth with the needed skills and capacity building.
According to him the African continent and especially the West Africa sub-region have a youthful population hence the need to build their capacity because their energy, that can be a weapon to use in developing the sub-region.
In an interview with journalists at the ongoing two days youth conference that drew one hundred and twenty youth to Accra, he said, “If we do not do that it rather becomes a threat to our democracy and so any initiative that seeks to develop the human capital is welcomed; and the government of Ghana has taken the lead to ensure the energies of the youth are directed rightly”.
On Monday, April 28, 2025 the John Dramani Mahama led government, launched the “Adwuma wura” programme; that is young Ghanaians who want to venture into entrepreneurship. Again, tomorrow we are launching the national apprenticeship programme which support youth with various skills”.
Again, the government of Ghana earlier launched the one million coders programme to support the young people within the ICT space. “Government knows how important the energies of the young people are and we need to turn it around positively; and that is what ECOWAS is also championing to see to it that young people are given the needed skills so that they can also contribute meaningful to development”.
He further added that Ghana cannot be an island as it operates within the sub-regional space, “so whatever Ghana’s vision is, it should align within the protocols and vision of ECOWAS, AfCFTA; we should all take advantage of it, every agenda and plans should seat within the ECOWAS and AU; we are not an island”.
Ghana alone is too small for us to leverage on our skills alone, we need each other as a sub-region; we should not do programme that are only focused on Ghana. Whatever we do, we should have an eye on the sub-region, he added.
Government sees the importance of our youth; they form 38.2 percent and no government would joke with this number and the NDC government would not do that and would not joke with that.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com