YEA will meet its employment targets – Gov’t

Government is hopeful of meeting its target of training 100,000 Ghanaians under the Youth Employment Agency (YEA).

The Chief Executive of YEA, Kobina Beecham, speaking to Citi News on the sidelines of the signing of Memorandum Of Understanding (MoU) between YEA and the National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI) said “we’ve trained 3,600 community policing assistants with the Ghana Police Service, we’ve trained 2000 fire support assistants and we’ve trained another 2000 with the Ghana Prison Service.”

Mr. Beecham noted, “that’s a total of 8,600.At the moment we have 19,500 community health workers undergoing field training across all the 216 districts” in the country.

“We are supremely confident that we will be able to hit the target our honorable sector Minister set us of a 100,000 youth.”

The YEA which replaced Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) now has the legal backing to ensure sustainability and prompt payment of a GHc 250 monthly allowance to trainees.

The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between YEA and the NVTI is to extend the training to the informal sector.

About YEA

The youth employment Agency was inaugurated under the youth employment act 2015 (Act 887) with the aim of empowering the youth in order to be a significant contributor to the sustainable and socio-economic development of the country.

YEA has been a buttress for the youth between the ages of 15 and 35 years by training them to acquire employable skills and taking them through internship

Since its inception, the program has trained over 26,000 youth under various modules under the security and health sectors.

The mission of the YEA is “to lead the coordination of employment opportunities and creation of jobs for the youth in Ghana”.

Their vision is “to become an outstanding Public Sector Agency facilitating and creating sustainable employment opportunities for the youth nationwide”.

YEA not a solution to unemployment

Meanwhile, a senior research fellow at the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET), Dr. William Baah Boateng has challenged the feasibility of YEA saying it is not a sustainable avenue of job creation.

According to him, YEA, “is a skills training avenue to make sure the youth become employable but is not to create jobs as it were.”

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By: Kuukua Buahin/Citifmonline.com/Ghana