Street kids are entreprenuers and should be encouraged
Street kids are entreprenuers and should be encouraged
May 29, 2006
Amid intense debate over employment and unemployment, Prof. Stephen Adei, Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) is pushing for society to encourage kids who sell to develop their entrepreneurial skills.
Prof. Adei argues that rather than chasing them off the streets, streets kids who engage in selling to make a living should be assisted to develop their skills and become big time business men and women. In his view, the kids should be encouraged to go to school and be allowed to sell after they close from school. Prof. Adei’s was giving his closing remarks at the just ended silver jubilee celebrations of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana. Prof.
Adei’s comments come on heels of the 2005 Afrobarometer report, which ranked unemployment high on the list of pressing problems facing Africans. As a regular feature of the Afrobarometer, respondents in 12 African countries were asked about their development agenda. According to the report, unemployment has overtaken education as the most pressing need many households would want their governments to solve. Fourty-six percent (46%) of all the 56, 000 respondents in the 12 countries, including Ghana said they were worried about job creation in their countries. That perhaps, explains why the government recently launched a 1.5 trillion cedi Job Corp Fund to create more jobs for the youth. The government had made a number of attempts to address unemployment since 2001. One attempt was the registration of about 950,000 people, mainly the youth who needed employment. But the government soon realized that many of them did not have employable skills.
Dr Charles Brempong-Yeboah, Deputy Minister of Manpower, Youth and Employment last week explained that the youth employment programme would ensure a significant proportion of the Youth are actively engaged in productive ventures. The Deputy Minister noted that the programme would help the youth to develop good character through hard work and discipline to develop economically into responsible adults.
“This will be done through holding leadership, motivational, civic education, religious, moral and ethical-based seminars, as well as training activities.” To ensure sustainable development, Dr Brempong-Yeboah cautioned that while satisfying the employment needs of the present generation, it would not be compromised for the needs of the future generation. He said that all the activities of the National Youth Employment Programme should be environmentally friendly and take cognisance of socio-cultural interests of communities and ensure gender equality. Dr Brempong-Yeboah said various forms of training including orientations, briefing sessions, on-the-job training and refresher courses, would be conducted to enhance the capacity of the different levels of people and stressed that efforts would be made to pool funds together for easy disbursement and monitoring.
On the Afrobarometer report, the next most pressing issue on the public agenda is health care, including control of HIV/AIDS. It is noteworthy that health now outranks education as a popular priority. This, the report says represents a generational shift, because at the time of independence, and for a couple of decades after, Africans tended to emphasize access to education as their main concern. But persistent unemployment and rising cases of communicable disease have cast doubt on the assumption that having a high educational qualification is a passport to guaranteed employment. Many respondents also see poverty and hunger as the continent’s fastest growing problems.
On the popular development agenda, poverty is up 18 points, while hunger is up by 20 points over the last six years. The largest decrease in food poverty was reported in Lesotho, where the gross domestic product grew steadily after 2000. Hunger is the least common in Ghana, where, in 2005, only 35 percent reported a food shortage of any duration. By contrast, food shortage rose sharply in Nigeria and Malawi and Zimbabwe, where the shortages were rampant, according to the report.
Author: Amos Safo
