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Friday, March 29, 2024

Gov’t spent GHc100m on capacity building for entrepreneurs

An amount of 100 million Ghana cedis has been spent by the Ministry for Business Development in the past two years on capacity building for entrepreneurs across the country.

This is according to Sector Minister, Ibrahim Awal Mohammed.

The Ministry has for the past two years implemented a number of initiatives including the Presidential Pitch, Green Business development, Capacity building for women and disabled entrepreneurs.

Addressing the media at the Meet the Press series on Tuesday, Mr. Awal said the government is ready to spend even more money to build the capacity of young entrepreneurs in order to give them a competitive advantage in the era of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement.

“We spent about GHc100 million building the capacity of entrepreneurs across Ghana and we are going to spend much more to make sure our young ones compete effectively not only in Ghana but globally.”

“Under financial business support, we have trained 19,000 in two years, provided funding for 1,350 of them, out of which over 4,000 jobs have been created…We intend to support young women and men with funding.”

Mr Awal on Eyewitness News further explained that the initiative is aimed at addressing youth unemployment in the country.

“The issue of youth and employment is a big challenge to everyone around the world and the President has noted that one solid way of solving youth unemployment is through entrepreneurship and in line with this we have issued a number of programmes,” he said.

120,000 jobs to be created 

The Minister further indicated that government intends creating 120,000 jobs under the youth entrepreneurship programmes within five years to help reduce youth unemployment and bolster the economy.

He said 19,000 young entrepreneurs and start-ups have been supported with capacity-building initiatives and funding to implement their business ideas within two years, noting that 7,000 of them were trained in 2017 and 12,000 are being trained this year.

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