Deputy Majority leader and Member of Parliament for Effutu Mr Alexander Afenyo-Markin has urged the youth to develop a new mindset on employment and creation of jobs for themselves.
According to him, the mindset has hitherto been for the youth to seek employment in government offices and receive monthly salaries instead of daring to be entrepreneurs.
The new mindset, he said, should be deeply rooted in entrepreneurship with a voracious appetite for it to drive the youth to become millionaires and billionaires.
“Build sustainable businesses yourselves, employ others and create sustainable wealth in the process,” he stated.
Mr Afenyo-Markin who made the call at a Winneba Entrepreneurship Seminar last Sunday noted that the sheer number of able-bodied young men and women who flooded the venue of the recently-held two-day job fair in a desperate search for job opportunities was striking.
“Weeks earlier, many of us here saw similar scenes on television and in the newspapers of so many thousands of young men and women inundating Ghana Army recruitment centres around our country, hoping for an opportunity to get enlisted in our Armed Forces.
“While the scenes mentioned above show that many of our purposeful youth crave to secure honest employment to become helpful men and women of our society tomorrow, they equally emphasize an all too familiar national challenge – I’m talking about disturbing levels of youth unemployment,” he stated.
Mr Afenyo-Markin noted that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo has taken bold and intelligent initiatives to confront the employment challenge with initiatives that include the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) and the One District One Factory (1D1F) programmes.
The impact of these initiatives, he said, has been massive thus far with figures suggesting the PFJ alone has created more than two million jobs since the initiative started in 2017.
“There are many more of these initiatives to create employment, wealth and ensure social cohesion and sustainability by keeping our youth away from the evils and temptations of idleness,” he added.
He outlined innovation, hard work, risk-taking and critical thinking as the magical skills for creating and managing a successful business and urged the youth to cultivate such values.
He noted that in Effutu many youths are demonstrating each of these skills, traits and values and are succeeding in their respective endeavours with some support.
The Deputy Majority Leader disclosed that since becoming MP, he has established a scheme to invest in promising entrepreneurship projects within the constituency with about 5,000 men and women receiving GH¢1000 each in soft loans to start their own businesses.
These interventions and more, he said, are creating new businesses and helping expand existing ones and in the process creating wealth, reducing poverty, creating sustainable employment and above all, developing the next generation of intelligent businessmen and women.
The MP, however, lamented the culture of one-person businesses and stressed it is one of the biggest problems serving as a barrier to development
He averred that the time has come for Ghana to emphasize creative and innovative partnerships to fast track the growth of enterprises by pushing them to reach markets and customers that were hitherto under-served and unserved.
