Beneficiaries of employable skills training programmes have been advised to avoid the tendency of selling out the free working tools and start-up materials supplied them to help them establish jobs and improve their lives. Rev. Walter Bimpong, Executive Director of International Needs, Ghana (ING), a non-governmental organization (NGO), who sounded the caution also advised parents and husbands to avoid exerting financial pressure on the trainees with the view to getting part of start-up capital given them. Rev. Bimpong was addressing the graduation ceremony of the eighth batch of the Australian Agency for International Development sponsored Modular Vocational Training Program Phase II. The 100 beneficiaries were trained for three months at the ING Vocational Training Centre (INVTC) at Adidome. The participants made up of children of victims of the Trokosi system, widows, needy JSS graduates from the Ketu, North Tongu, Dangme East and South Tongu districts, learnt skills in batik, Tie and Dye, soap and powder making, bread and confectionary preparation. They were supplied with working tools, start-up materials and working capital to establish jobs. Rev. Bimpong asked the participants to be agents of change for the expunging of obnoxious and harmful traditional practices such the Trokosi practice. He said the practice of cultural beliefs that inhibit the education and empowerment of women should be discouraged as experience showed that uneducated women largely did not educate their children and that poverty remained more endemic in areas where majority of the women were not educated. Mr Moses Asem, North Tongu District Chief Executive (DCE), said there were plans to supply a transformer to the INVCT centre and to link it by road from Bakpa to the Adidome Township. He advised the beneficiaries to form groups to access micro funds support from the Assembly to help develop their businesses, train others in the areas to further expand the benefits of the program. Mrs Patience Vormawor, Project Coordinator, said with the passing out of the current 100 trainees, 97 women were left to be trained for the program to exhaust the 900 target figure under Phase II, to bring to 1,800, the total number of beneficiaries since 2002. Source: GNA