Govt youth employment interventions focus on the number of beneficiaries rather than quality of outcomes — Mr. Senayah

Mr. Tonyi Senayah, Chief Executive Officer of Horseman Shoes has revealed that government’s employment and entrepreneur initiatives do not yield the needed result because they only provide monies to some Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Start-Ups, which is not effective.

“The focus of these interventions seems to be on the number of beneficiaries rather than the quality of outcomes. This is because what some of the previous interventions sought to do, was to simply throw money at businesses and Start-Ups, but from experience, small businesses need more than money to become sustainable,” he said.

Mr. Senayah said this when he presented a paper on “Youth Entrepreneurship: A Catalyst for Curbing Unemployment” at the Ishmael Yamson and Associates Roundtable Discussions which was monitored by the Communication for Development and Advocacy Consult (CDA Consult).

He said small businesses need more than money to become sustainable, and this is why managers of these programmes can produce long excel sheets of programme beneficiaries, but not so much of the desired impact.

He noted that small businesses needed hand-holding in areas of technical support, access to market, and human capital support among others adding that the Ghana Enterprise Agency must ensure these things happen for business sustainability.

Mr. Senayah said one major challenge within the ecosystem of such governmental interventions was the disconnect between the implementing agencies and called for strategic alliances between government pro-youth agencies.

It was for this reason that, some institutional arrangements to extend support to small-to-medium sized businesses, and to build capacity for young people, such as the Ministry of Youth and Sport, National Youth Authority, Ghana Enterprise Agency (formerly NBSSI), and MASLOC among others were established.

He added that it was with the same aim that governments established Youth Enterprise Support (YES), which was renamed National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (NEIP) in 2017 in addition to direct job placement interventions such as GYEEDA, now (YEA), and NABCO with its multiple modules.

He described as a worrying trend the lack of concrete results from the interventions, questioning what the monumental results could be pointed at after ten years of the implementation of such brilliant programmes and policies.

“The National Entrepreneurship Innovation Programme reports on its website that 9,350+ businesses have received funding. But we often don’t see documented results post-funding. And for learning purposes, I think it is equally important we document failure stories,” he stated.

“Real or not, these interventions have also been over-politicized. Yes, it is difficult to de-link politics from a programme implemented by a partisan government; the perception or perhaps the reality is that to benefit from a policy or to get support from a government agency, one must be an affiliate of a party or know someone in government, does not permit real businesses in need of support to participate in some of these interventions,” he said.

This, he said inhibited people with genuine businesses from reaching out for assistance, saying one way of solving this problem was for Ghana to resolve to appoint technocrats rather than partisan appointees to head such agencies.

Mr. Senayah also called for a legislative framework for long-term and sustainable programmes and policies to promote accountability and ensure continuity regardless of any change in government.

According to him the question of whether Ghana had had enough governmental interventions, was definite yes adding that such policies had been poorly implemented.

“Nonetheless, the argument is not to discourage new interventions like the “YOU START” programme, but to promote learning from previous ones to facilitate better implementation for desired outcomes,” he said.

He said it was fair to acknowledge that all governments, post-independence, have recognized the role start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses especially those owned and managed by young people, played in driving immediate economic growth and good future out-turn for jobs, incomes, and taxes.