Pius Enam Hadzide flanked by his two deputies and some staff of NYA
THE ASANTEHENE, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has implored the management of the National Youth Authority (NYA) to find more innovative ways of creating employment opportunities for the uneducated and unskilled youth of the country.
He noted that not all the country’s youthful population can receive formal education and that they (the unskilled and uneducated youth) must also be helped.
The Asantehene was speaking last Friday, January 21, when the CEO of NYA, Pius Enam Hadzide, with his two deputies and directors paid a courtesy call on him at the Manhyia Palace.
Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said integrating the uneducated youth to the skilled workforce is beneficial to the development of the country.
He explained that when the youth get jobs to do, they will honour their tax obligation to boost the country’s economy.
Mr. Hadzide said they were calling on the Monarch to reintroduce and explain the mandate of the authority to him.
“We came to the Asantehene to also appeal to him to continue to support NYA in the implementation, particularly one of our major flagships that we intend to roll out in the coming months,” the NYA boss said.
As part of measures to rekindle the spirit of volunteerism, Mr. Hadzide said that the NYA has decided to embark on a project dubbed, ‘The National Youth Volunteer Programme (NYVP)’ which would employ 100,000 young people and inculcate in them the spirit of volunteerism and deploy them to the hinterlands of the country to work.
According to him, the 100,000 young men and women would serve as nurses, teachers and other services.
“We have noticed the problem of the lack of the spirit of volunteerism in our country. We witness some young white people coming from the United States, Germany, France, and United Kingdom as volunteers but those of us Ghanaians who are here daily, shy away from solving our own problems,” he said.
Ghanaians, he said, “shy away from volunteering; we are not prepared to go to the remote areas of the country because those places are not as comfortable as life in Accra or Kumasi.”
“There are many times that we have the capacity and the competence to solve some of our own problems but because of the absence of financial inducement or benefits many of us refrain from offering our assistance to solve the problem that we confront,” he noted.
He said with the full support of the Asantehene, the NYVP will be launched in the coming months at the Manhyia Palace under his patronage.
FROM David Afum, Kumasi