The Bono East Regional Minister, Kwesi Adu Gyan has urged the youth of the region to take advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic and work towards developing innovative technological ideas that would enable them compete in the current digital dispensation.

He made this call whilst addressing participants at the maiden Bono East Digital Jobs Fair held in Techiman under the theme, "Building resilient creatives for the job market".

"The Covid-19 pandemic has its own advantages and disadvantages but the pandemic if there's anything that it has done positively for us in the IT world, it is to enable people to see that we are living in a global economy and that anything happening in any part of the world affect anybody anywhere in the world," he stated. 

With the Techiman Market being the largest food crop market in the West African sub-region, the Minister called on the people to develop platforms that would serve as an e-commerce hub to display products for farmers far and near.

"Sitting here in Techiman and knowing very well that Techiman is a commercial city, there are a lot of opportunities. I cannot see why somebody in Techiman cannot have Techiman Market as an e-commerce platform to display their produce. We sell yams, maize and almost everything here and if you have an e-commerce shop on the internet, there are people in Accra who need such products and would buy from you," he said.

Chief Executive officer of Agrico Hub, organizers of the event, disclosed that the move is aimed at creating more jobs for the teeming youth through the digital space.

"You know Covid has come and it has created a lot of trading imbalances but with the use of digital tools like social media and other local digital avenues, we are able to help our people who are into various forms of businesses to actually scale up their businesses".

He, however, added that "as part of the job fair, we invited a lot of businesses and we see a lot of corporate organizations that are here to offer jobs to participants and people are getting jobs right here. This is one of the reasons we came up with this fair".

He added that with the Bono East Region behind in terms of internet usage, the firm is training more people in digital media as a means of bridging the gap.

"If you look at the regional divide of internet usage, you'll realize that Bono East, we are not doing so well and we as a business innovation hub, we use entrepreneurship combined with digitization and this means we are going to bridge the gap going forward," he further noted. 

Some of the participants expressed joy with the program and are hopeful that their respective entities would be transformed going forward.