The second Conference and Annual General Meeting of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, Ashanti region chapter is focusing on incorporating entrepreneurship in the engineering profession.

The meeting saw the attendance of craftsmen, artisans, students and engineers. The meeting sought to educate engineers on ways to fuse entrepreneurship into the profession.

“We are encouraging engineers to look at entrepreneurship because of the job issue currently. Personally, I don’t believe engineers should not be looking for jobs because they don’t have jobs.

“Engineers by their training should be innovative and they should be able to think outside the box and bring solutions that can be implemented and so engineers at any point in time should create jobs,” said Registrar of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, Ing. Isaac Badu.

He also spoke on the importance of the partnership between the craftsmen and engineers.

“We are bringing the engineers and the craftsmen together so even if the engineer doesn’t have the know how in translating his innovative idea into something tangible that can be put on the market crafts men are there to assist.

“So, the engineer and the craftsman coming together will be able to come up with the innovative idea that will be put on the market,” he said

Ing. Sophia Abena Tijani, the Vice president of the Ghana Institution of Engineering further explained the importance of the collaboration between the craftsmen and the engineers.

“The engineering work is not done by one person, somebody will build, somebody will design, somebody will implement, it is a whole value chain and a lot of people involved we have craftsmen, technicians and engineers

“We have brought all these people together so that we develop the capacity of these people and make sure that we are doing the engineering work per standards.

“Everybody is needed we all have a role to play,” she said.

Principal electrical engineer at the electricity company of Ghana Engineer Alberta Amankwaa encouraged women to enter the engineering field.

“Especially with climate change we need women to come on board because women have some soft skills and they are very empathetic and so they will really want to delve in the solutions to such problems.

“When they come on board, we tend to get greater output,” she said.