Minister reveals Ghanaian govt’s plan to create jobs, provide entrepreneurial support

The government of Ghana has assured to create 120,000 jobs under the youth entrepreneurship programmes in the next 5 years. This will help the government to reduce unemployment among the youths and enhance the economy.

Ibrahim Mohammed Awal, Ghana's Minister for Business Development recently said at the 'Meet-the-Press' series in Accra the government and private sectors have already spent GH¢100 million so far in capacity-building and financial support in the past two years. According to him, 19,000 young entrepreneurs and start-ups have been supported with capacity-building initiatives and funding so that they are able to implement their business ideas within two years. Almost 7,000 of them were trained in 2017 and 12,000 are to be trained this year.

The Minister said government-supported young entrepreneurs with various amounts ranging between GH¢25,000 and GH¢50,000 under the Presidential Support Programme, while 1,350 existing small-and-medium businesses were supported with funding between GH¢10,000 and GH¢100,000, as reported by Graphic Online.

The Ministry has a Monitoring Unit to monitor the business activities of the beneficiaries and revealed that it observed a 70 percent recovery rate from those who received financial support in 2018. The government's mandate is to build an entrepreneurial culture in young people so as to create jobs and alleviate poverty in society.

On the other hand, the government of Ghana is committed to develop and support entrepreneurs across the country with the utmost objective to reduce unemployment. "We are willing to fund graduates from the various universities with business ideas because there are no jobs in Ghana and not everyone can get a public sector job so people cannot sit and wait for government," Ibrahim Mohammed Awal said.

Through his speech, he further urged the Ghanaian youths between 18 and 35 to take advantage of the initiative. "We can no longer joke with unemployment issue in Ghana because it has become a national security issue so we want to empower the youth and graduates to be job creators," he cited while addressing the youths.

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