Tamale centre trains girls in vocational skills

Twenty-two girls, drawn from the Tamale Metropolis and its surrounding communities, have completed a three-year vocational training in dressmaking, fashion and designing at the Northern Youth for Peace and Community Development (NYPCD) training centre in Tamale.

As a way of helping them to start their own businesses, the NYPCD, in collaboration with the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), gave each of the girls working tools that amounted to GH¢18,036.00. The measure is also to permanently support the girls to keep them in business and prevent them from migrating to southern Ghana to work as female porters, otherwise known as ‘kayayei’, after completion of their courses.

Speaking at a graduation at which the equipment and certificates were presented to the newly trained dressmakers, the Director of the NYPCD, Mr Yussif Hamidu, said his outfit currently had a total of 70 girls, out of which the 22 had completed their three-year course in dressmaking. He said the trainees, who have little or no formal education, were from communities such as Jarigu, Gbabshi, Cheko, Lahagu, Vitting and the Saboba District.

According to him, the vision of the NYPCD was to replicate the training of such girls in the Central Gonja District, adding that already land had been acquired in that area for the project.

"The NYPCD hopes to expand its activities to cover such areas as Buipe, Yapei, Sankpala, Jaabayili and Nanton; our target is also to enrol 100 girls by the close of this year," he stressed.

Mr Hamidu announced that the organisation, with support from the Ministry of Health, had over the past three years trained 210 people in regenerative health and nutrition.

He, however, mentioned the inadequate funds to cater for feeding cost of the trainees and lack of transport and water storage facilities as some of the challenges facing the organisation in its quest to reduce poverty among the girls, and said  there was the need to complete a two-room training workshop, as well as construct a hostel for the trainees.

The Co-ordinator of Agriculture Modernisation and Food Security of the SADA, Mr Abass Karim, pledged on behalf of the organisation to support such programmes.

He entreated residents of the region not to see SADA as another political entity but a development institution that was capable of enhancing the well-being of people in the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone.

The Deputy Co-ordinating Director of the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly, Mr Abdul Aziz, noted that the programme had come at a time when the government was committed to equipping the youth to acquire skills.

He told the youth to stop looking up to people for help because it had the tendency of killing their initiative and creative minds.

By Vincent Amenuveve/Daily Graphic/Ghana