Institutions, assemblies should provide youths with credit facilities

Koforidua, Aug. 18, GNA - The Deputy Government Statistician, Prof. Nicholas N.N. Nsuowah-Nuamah, has called on financial institutions and District Assemblies to develop micro-credit schemes to cater for the peculiar needs of the youth who had received training in employable skills.

He said such schemes would go a long way to check the incidence of streetism, which he noted, was increasingly becoming a phenomenon typifying a situation of low returns to education and inefficient utilization of the country's human resources. Prof. Nsuowah-Nuamah, who was speaking at the graduation and exhibition Day of the Victory Vocational Institute in Koforidua, stressed the need for more emphasis to be placed on vocational and technical education and training as being pursued by some of the few vocational technical institutions to prepare the youth adequately for emerging job market.

He said the time had come for the country's development agenda to empower more women with employable skills to enable them play meaningful roles in the country's development and commended the founder of the Victory Vocational Institute for targeting young women for training to acquire employable skills who would have otherwise lived and worked on the streets.

The New Juaben Municipal Chief Executive, Nana Adjei Boateng announced that a number of the existing Youth Training Centres were being rehabilitated to position them well for the training of the youth as part of the government's Skills Training and Entrepreneurship Programme (STEP) to impart entrepreneurial skills into the youth.

He called on vocational institutions to set up career counselling units to guide the students in choosing appropriate careers and advised the graduates to explore the possibility of forming co-operative groups to qualify for soft loans from the financial institutions.

Nana Adjei Boateng announced that the Municipal Assembly would soon establish a garment factory in Koforidua in response to the Rural Enterprises Development Programme (REDP) to help provide employment to the youth.

Touching on the HIV/AIDS menace, he advised the graduates to be on their guard and to shun peer influences, which would lead them to "destructive living styles" as they were going to start living on their own.

The Executive Director of the Institute, Evangelist Mrs Margaret Amankrah, in her welcoming address, announced that the Institute is to include driving into to the curriculum and also to establish a multi-purpose library for the students.

She appealed to the government to consider assisting private first class vocational technical institutes with the GETFund to enable them achieve their vision of training the youth to acquire skills. On the achievements of the Institute, she said for two years now all the candidates who sat for the City and Guilds examinations scored 100 per cent, four-time winners of Independence Day parade match past competition and had also benefited from equipment from the Department for International Development (DFID).