The National Youth Authority, an Agency under the Ministry of Youth and Sports in charge of co-ordinating and facilitating youth development activities in the country, will from December 3, 2018 begin a nationwide consultative tour to all the ten regions in Ghana.

The NYA will be engaging stakeholders on the National Youth Policy, which is undergoing a review during the tour.

The essence of these decentralized stakeholder engagements is to take onboard the views of all stakeholders particularly the youth across the country, in fine-tuning the policy to reflect the exigencies of time.

The National Youth Policy is a crucial document that provides general framework for Government to engage the youth and other stakeholders in meaningful partnership with the view to rolling out appropriate interventions for youth empowerment and development.

In order to remain relevant, the policy document must be reviewed constantly to address emerging issues affecting the youth. However, the current national youth policy document was drafted in 2010 and hence, may not reflect the current development needs of the youth of today due to passage of time and changing societal dynamics.

Indeed, in cognizance of this reality, the current leadership of the NYA in October 22, 2018, after engaging stakeholders, set up a technical committee with representatives from each of the stakeholder organizations to develop a concept paper for the review of the National Youth Policy and make recommendations. Pursuant to that, the NYA has resolved to embark on a nationwide tour to engage the stakeholders including the various identifiable youth groups in each region, MMDCEs, and representatives of the various regional houses of chiefs on the changes to be effected to the policy document.

These regional tours would be climaxed with a national forum to be held in Accra on December 18, 2018, before the final report would be submitted to the supervising Ministry for the necessary considerations. We encourage all and sundry particularly the youth in all the ten regions of the country to participate actively in this important exercise geared at putting the youth at the centre of national development agenda.

The National Youth Authority anticipates the cooperation of all stakeholders.