Damongo: Beneficiaries of Ghana jobs and skills 'Youstart' undergoes training in entrepreneurship

Some 35 selected youth in the West Gonja Municipality of the Savanah Region have been trained in entrepreneurship by the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) at a workshop in Damongo in the Savannah Region.

The 35 comprises of 34 females and a male including an earlier 35 making 70 youth were trained in a pilot programme from March 24 to 29, 2023 under the Ghana jobs and skills 'Youstart' project.

The Savannah Regional Director of the Ghana Enterprises Agency, Alidu Ewura in an interview with Bole based Nkiligi FM indicated that the World Bank is providing financial and technical support to the Government of Ghana (GoG) for the implementation of the Ghana jobs and skills project.

He further said that the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) is implementing Component 2.1 of the project which has the objective of providing entrepreneurship training and competitive startup grants to the youth who have the potential to start a business.

Alidu Ewura disclosed that the project is geared to train more than 50,000 youth with 50% of their target beneficiaries being women and a priority given to persons with disability or physically challenged, unemployed youth and existing MSME’s owned by school dropouts between the ages of 18 yrs to 40 yrs.

Speaking on the mode of application, Ewura explained that an online portal was opened in November, 2022 for interested persons to apply to be enrolled into the project though the agency received 288,000 applications, adding that after the application, those who scored the past mark were shortlisted for the training.

He also noted that the training has been broken down into phases due to the number of applicants to ensure that the limit the trainer-participant ratios to provide a quality learner experience.

Alidu Ewura said the training will be in 3 levels which includes; Basic, Intermediate and Advanced.

At the basic Level, all participants will go through a basic training of 5 days where they will need to participate fully to complete the level to progress to the intermediate level.

At the intermediate Level, the training will last for 10 days where participants will need to participate fully to complete the intermediate level to progress to the advanced level training.

Also at the intermediate stage, existing youth businesses and unemployed youth with vocational skills will be eligible to apply for grant support. The grant support at this stage is highly competitive.

"The advanced level training will last for 15 days and will involve an incubation process to finetune business plans and ideas, provide coaching and mentoring and access to network events and trade shows for the participants", he said.

The 'Youstart' project is a flagship programme of the Government of Ghana, considered as one of the main forms of support for the government’s top priority agenda of upgrading skills among the country’s population, creating more and better-quality jobs, and improving job outcomes for the youth.

The five days training for the basic level of the project started on Monday May, 8 and ended on Friday, May 13, 2023 and was based on standardised, quality-assured packages in all seven districts in the Savannah Region where each district trained 70 beneficiaries using an experiential participatory approach conducive for adult learning and was also on district based and non-residential.