Skills Development Fund: Women, persons with disabilities encouraged to apply
The second call for application for the Ghana Skills Development Fund (GSDF) begins on August 1 to 31, 2023, the Commission for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET) has announced.
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The fund, which was launched in Accra last Monday to coincide with the disbursement of the first call, is being implemented by the CTVET, and is a collabrative effort by the Government of Ghana (GoG) with development partners to establish the fund to support skills development.
The fund, is a grant from the World Bank through the International Development Association (IDA).
Preferred applicants
The Director-General of the CTVET, Dr Fred Kyei Asamoah, who launched the second call for the fund, encouraged women-led businesses and enterprises with women dominated workforces to apply.
He also encouraged persons living with disabilities to apply, and was hopeful that the second call would be more competitive than the first one.
Dr Asamoah explained that the decision of the fund managers to give preference to the two group of people was because of their vulnerability.
“Also, per the country demographics, averagely, they are under employed,” he explained, adding that their rating was a bit lowered, compared with their male and abled persons’ counterparts.
Confidence
Dr Asamoah explained that he expected it to be particularly so because potential applicants would be more willing to apply because even before the launch, others had already accessed the fund.
Explaining further after the launch, he said the commission would intensify sensitisation exercise throughout the country to get potentially qualified enterprises to apply.
"Now that we have beneficiaries before launching, most people will now have confidence and believe that it is not a scam," the Director-General added.
Dr Asamoah gave the assurance that officials from the CTVET and the fund management unit were ready to support all potential applicants to go through the application session.
"As we reiterated, the money is not for you to spend, but it is to support to address a gap within your organisation.”
"A gap that when you fill will improve on your productivity, expand your activities and enable you to employ more," he stressed.
Statistics
The Fund Manager of the GSDF, Dunwell Eku, who gave some statistics, said the first call was launched in August 2022, a total of 1,891 concept notes were received out of which 643 were successful and selected to the present their full proposals.
"At that level, 490 out of that submitted their full proposals, out of which, when they were evaluated by the technical team, 406 of them passed," he added.
Mr Eku said at that point, the team visited each of them to do due diligence and to present recommendations to the steering committee.
"As we speak, we have 105 SMEs approved and gone on to sign their contracts with disbursement going to some of them," he explained.
