Alexander Afenyo-Markin
DEPUTY MAJORITY Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, has urged Ghanaian youth to prepare themselves for entrepreneurship while they are in school so as to earn big money.
According to him, recent scenes from the job and career fair and the recruitment process of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) reveal that the youth are obsessed with getting employed in the public sector to receive salaries rather than “daring to be entrepreneurs.”
Speaking at an entrepreneurship seminar at Winneba over the weekend, Mr. Afenyo-Markin, who is also the Member of Parliament (MP) for Effutu, said the youth needed to have a “voracious appetite” for entrepreneurship.
“It must drive you to become a millionaire or billionaire tomorrow through critical thinking, risk-taking, hard work and innovation. I am telling you about these values because I have relied on them to manage my businesses over the last two decades. They work like magic,” he stressed.
He said entrepreneurship is a challenging field which requires hard work to be able to achieve goals, intimating that “it rewards only focused, intelligent, and diligent people who deploy their energies towards finding solutions that become fair money-making opportunities.”
“There is no room for laziness or lethargy if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. Trust me hard and smart work will drive you faster to success,” he told participants at the seminar.
The MP said today’s entrepreneurs think about finding solutions to common problems of society, adding that currently, there is a technological revolution in Ghana led by Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.
“As a constituency, we must take advantage of the smart opportunities that technology brings to entrepreneurship and use them to create new businesses and enterprises that solve the problems we face, supply the goods and services we need and, in so doing, create the employment and wealth that Effutu needs to be a buoyant economy,” he urged.
Mr. Afenyo-Markin indicated that many youth in Effutu constituency were demonstrating the skills, traits and values of entrepreneurship and succeeding in their respective endeavours with his support.
“Many young men and women today own and run their own transportation businesses after receiving the necessary investment and support from the work and pay taxi scheme I have established since becoming your Member of Parliament in 2013”
“Also, over 80 outboard motors have been distributed at discounted prices this year to selected fishers across this constituency to help support their trade and help them expand”, he disclosed.
According to him, since he became MP for the area, some 5000 people have each received GH¢1,000 as soft loans from a scheme he has established to invest in promising entrepreneurship projects within the constituency.
“All these interventions and more are creating new businesses and helping expand existing ones. In the process, we are creating wealth, reducing poverty, creating sustainable employment and above all, developing the next generation of intelligent businessmen and women.”
By Ernest Kofi Adu