69 Women acquire vocational skills
SIXTY-NINE young women have graduated from a three-month intensive training in vocational skills under the Youth-in-Entrepreneurship initiative.
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The initiative, which forms part of the Network of Women in Growth (NEWIG) project, seeks to empower young women to be gainfully employed to make them self-reliant.
Skills
They were trained in bead making, basic catering, soap making, batik, tie-dye, floral arrangement, textile designing and basic financial management.
At an event held at Tefle in the Volta Region on October 2, 2015 on the theme, “Promoting sustainable economic development through skills training for women”, the young ladies were presented with tools that would help them set up their own businesses.
The Executive Director of NEWIG, Mrs Mawusi Nudekor Awity, announced that approximately $21,000 was used in the training programme.
“Things haven’t been easy. But we believe in squeezing water out of stones to empower these young ladies. Of course, we received support from Empower, British High Commission, Crossroads International, and African Women’s Development Fund,” she said.
Mrs Awity said the NEWIG initiative used local raw materials such as coconut, cocoa pods, shea butter, paper, empty sachet water packets to create products.
According to her, there is the need to encourage the setting up of cottage industries in parts of the country, to propagate the idea of domestication through patronage of local produce.
A Senior Field Officer of NEWIG, Ms Naomi Biney, said NEWIG had a monitoring mechanism to help the graduates grow their businesses.
SMEs
For his part, the Head of Rural Enterprise Programmes at Sogakope, Mr Eric Batse, said: “Small Scale Enterprises (SMEs) account for 90 per cent of the total operations in the industrial sector and offer 58 per cent of employment in the country.”
He said encouraging the growth of SMEs was a viable means of tackling the growing unemployment problem in the country.
Meanwhile, the District Coordinating Director for South Tongu, Mrs Jemima Apedo, has underscored the need for attitudinal change on the part of some Ghanaians who have insatiable taste for foreign produce, which she described as a bane of local economic growth.
