Ministry to set up fund for youth employment

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10-10-08

THE Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment (MMYE) has initiated moves to institutionalise a funding regime for youth employment and youth enterprise in the country.
This is to ensure that there is a statutory pool of funds to support youth employment and young people with bright business and entrepreneurial ideas.
In view of that, the ministry has filed a memo for Cabinet’s approval to develop a draft bill to that effect.
“Upon Cabinet’s policy approval, a bill entitled ‘Youth Employment and Enterprise Fund’ would be submitted to Cabinet and ultimately to Parliament for consideration and enactment into an Act,” the sector minister, Nana Akomeah, said at the second anniversary celebration of the NYEP in Accra yesterday.
Since its launch in October 2006 by President Kufuor, he said, 109,000 young men and women had been beneficiaries of the programme, which cost the government $100 million a year.
He gave the breakdown as Sanitation module, 15,000; Nursing Assistantship, 4,500; Community Policing, 4,500; Youth in Agriculture, 25,000; Community Teaching Assistants, 25,000; Trades and Vocation/Entrepreneurial, 300; Afforestation, 1,400 and Industrial Attachment, 3,000.
Nana Akomea noted that a major drawback for the NYEP since 2006 had been the delay in the release of funds from designated sources, and that in May this year, upon the Cabinet’s approval, the NYEP signed a financial management service agreement with the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB).
“This agreement provides ADB with over 70,000 new accounts of NYEP beneficiaries and handling of all the programme’s funds. In return, the ADB credits all beneficiary accounts on a monthly basis,” he stated, adding that “when the transfers into the programme’s accounts are made, ADB is reimbursed and paid a management fee of 0.5 per cent, or on interest of 1.54 per cent when our accounts are insufficient”.
He indicated that since the agreement beneficiaries had been paid timeously, relieving the situation when allowances were paid three to five months in arrears, and that in the immediate period up to the end of the year, the NYEP was considering proposals to effect increase in allowances to all beneficiaries.
Nana Akomeah said the issue of employment was the core measurement of how development policy and programmes were impacting on citizens.
He said the country in the last seven years had seen the most sustained increase in the economy, and that in the last two years in particular, “we have reached six per cent growth rates, the highest since 1984 when we embarked on economic structural adjustment”.
The Secretary General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Brother Kofi Asamoah, urged the government to de-politicise the recruitment of the programme in order to ensure its success and sustainability.
“We of the TUC see the NYEP as a very productive way of using the energy of the teeming youth across the country. It is thus necessary for the government to facilitate processes towards the passage of a National Youth Employment Law working in concert with the National Service Scheme,” he said.
He said the government should also devise modalities for the training and eventual integration of NYEP personnel into the organisations that were currently employing them.
Mr Asamoah said the government should consider dialoguing with private sector actors in the telecommunications, real estate and small-scale manufacturing industries to provide training and subsequent employment for NYEP personnel in those areas.
“We of the TUC are particularly happy about the NYEP because it is one of the few large-scale national policies and programmes that are truly country-owned in terms of the policy initiative and financing,” he said.