The Ghana Chamber of Young Entrepreneurs is asking the Finance Minister to provide answers as to why the YouStart initiative launched to provide technical support to youth-led businesses was never started.

According to the Chief Executive Officer, Sherif Ghali although the World Bank had provided the money needed to finance the project, Ken Ofori-Atta had failed to allocate the money for the commencement.

This, he said, the 2024 budget must provide answers to.

“You don’t come and tell the young person that 'I understand that one of the critical needs you have is access to funding and for that reason, I am coming up with YouStart' and up till now, the actual YouStart for the past two to three years has not been implemented. You can go and ask all the agencies aside from all the prototyping that they did and JEA using a component of World Bank support and calling it YouStart.”

He said on the Joy Business Pre Budget Forum on Monday ahead of the budget reading on Wednesday, 15th, November 2023.

He said this is an issue of concern for young entrepreneurs, which the Finance Minister must address.

“The actual YouStart that was supposed to be a GH₵10 million that will be supported or put in a fund never materialized and the Ministry of Finance must tell us why. If you don’t have the money, why don’t you have it,” he quizzed.

Mr Ghali said that he did not understand how an initiative targeted at creating a million jobs was prototyped, stressing that “how do you prototype giving money to a few young entrepreneurs.”

“We would like to hear from the Finance Minister why is it that we don’t have the GH₵10 million you promised or why we deliberately told the young people that we are going to create one million jobs and support those of you who want to be entrepreneurs,” he said.

He stressed that he wanted to see what plans the government had to support young entrepreneurs.