Speakers at a meeting on entrepreneurship said on Friday there were no avenues and opportunities for the promotion of the people’s development. For instance, they said the educational system in the country was not producing the workforce needed to beef up the human resource base of the country, making education a privilege and not a right. These were some of the observations at the eighth dailyEXPRESS Breakfast series on the theme; Entrepreneurship: “Growing the next generation of Leaders” in Accra. The meeting, an initiative of the dailyEXPRESS Newspaper is a platform that brings together major stakeholders to discuss issues of national development concerns and tabling of solutions. In his presentation, Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, Former Director General, Ghana Health Service (GHS) said the situation was worrying, especially with 80 percent of the students ending their education at Junior High Level with majority of them not able to write their own names. Equally worrying was the 50 percent failure at the Basic Education Certificate Exams (BECE), though it was a concept which placed emphasis on technical and vocational training. What the country lacked, he said, was skills development; career counselling and mentorship, adding, “The classroom does not teach every thing but practice does” and called for a system that created room for both rich and poor to have equal opportunity to develop. Mr Joseph Winful, Senior Partner, KPMG a local accounting firm said entrepreneurship was not just about classroom work but the development of talents, being disciplined and ensuring time management. He encouraged the youth to do away with the idea that, “the world owes me a living and everything should be free” and be creative innovative and embrace hard work to be able to build their own capacity for higher productivity. “The challenge is you and you can do it with the right attitudes” he said. Dr Ekwow Spio Garbrah, Chief Executive Officer, Commonwealth Telecommunication Organization said entrepreneurship was not always opening a business but exhibiting a talent to occupy a person such as leading a church which until recently was not a profitable venture. He urged academia to dialogue with industry to produce a skilful human resource base for industry. Manpower, Youth and Employment Minister, Nana Akomea said government had a renewed commitment to put in place a Youth policy by July 2008. He expressed the hope that suggestions made would be made available to the Ministry to be incorporated into the policy, adding that, one of the major highlights of the policy was an entrepreneurship model that aimed at giving some skill training to people who were out of school. Source: GNA