A Day’s ‘Youth Entrepreneurship Training Programme for AfCFTA Opportunities’, under the auspices of the National Youth Authority (NYA) and UNDP, has ended at the Youth Resource Center, near Ahinsan Estates in Kumasi.
The training was meant to enhance the business skills and knowledge on the operations of AfCFTA and also to promote youth involvement in intra-African trade and market opportunities, with the target as young men and women with entrepreneurial drive to create economic livelihood for themselves and others.
Mr. Nelson Owusu Ansah, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of NYA, explained that the purpose of the training was to support young people who have taken the initiative to venture into entrepreneurship, because employment is the expectation of every youth in the country.
He said sometimes, it was the difficulties and the frustrations associated with such entrepreneurial initiatives that the NYA and the UNDP decided to partner to support such young entrepreneurs.
Mr. Owusu Ansah disclosed that the training is replicated in ten regions across the country with two districts benefiting in each region.
About 400 young people from 20 districts in the country are expected to benefit from the piloting stage of the programme.
The CEO said lots of young men and women did not either know, hear or understand anything about the Continental Free Trade, let alone to take advantage of it and so the training explained how young entrepreneurs can access the AfCFTA market and thereby expand their trade.
He advised the Ghanaian youth to become businessmen and create their own businesses without looking up to anybody to employ them because all the billionaires of the world started with their own small businesses.
Two of the young entrepreneurs engaged in the manufacture of beads designed handbags and an innovative farmer who manufactures organic liquid fertilizer himself, were excited about the training programme, which they said have broadened their horizon on a lot of opportunities they hitherto did not know.
From Thomas Agbenyegah Adzey, Kumasi
