Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has launched the Government’s latest business and youth intervention, the Business and Employment Assistance Programme.
He launched the initiative in Sunyani on Monday, December 11.
The initiative, driven by the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) aims at nurturing young entrepre¬neurs, empower them to generate employment opportunities for the large pool of unemployed youths in the country.
The primary objective is to revive micro to small-scale enterprises affected by the global pandemic, enabling them to rehire laid-off em¬ployees, employ new workers, and provide essential skills for enhanced productivity.
It seeks to support 10,000 businesses owned by young Ghanaians, to employ 20,000 youth, whose salaries will be paid by the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), he said in tweet.
The jobs expected to be created under the initiative will add to the 2.1 million jobs already created, he said.
This, he added, will help to sustain and grow these businesses, as well as provide job opportunities.
“The Business and Employment Assistance Programme and other youth interventions under the YEA and under agencies, underline our government’s commitment to creating more jobs and opportunities to the youth, in addition to the 2.1m jobs created by the government in the past seven years in the public and private sectors respectively,” the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) said.
Speaking at the launch, Vice President, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia noted that the business sector has been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandem¬ic some of which were forced to close down during the partial and total lockdown resulting in job losses.
He said “the Ghana Business Tracker Survey conducted between May and June 2020 by the Ghana Statistical Service in collaboration with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, indicated that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 46.1 per cent of Ghanaian businesses had to reduce wages whereas 4.1 per cent of businesses laid off workers.”
By: Afia Owusu/myxyzonline.com /Ghana
