The Minister of Youth Development and Empowerment, George Opare-Addo, has appealed to the Vice President, Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, to intervene to release funds for the Ministry to roll out programmes to curb youth migration from the country.

He said, “Sadly, 72 per cent of our youth are considering leaving the shores of this country. We need to do more to reverse that mindset.”

He said three of the President’s flagship programmes fall under the Ministry – the National Apprenticeship Programme and the Adwumawura Programme, both of which were ongoing, but the National Service Military Training was still pending.

“The National Service Military Training is the only one that should have started last year – we’ve done everything – but the Finance Ministry is yet to release funds,” the Minister stated.

He said, “One of the things we wanted to use the military training to do at the preparing stage of our manifesto is to inculcate into the young people the sense of discipline and other things, but like I said it is still pending, and we want your intervention for the Finance Ministry to release the funds for us to roll out the programme.”

Mr Opare-Addo made the appeal during a presentation on the Ministry's mandate and activities when the Vice President paid a familiarisation visit to the Ministry on Wednesday.

He mentioned, among other programmes launched last year by the Ministry, the YouthXplore App and Dashboard, a digital innovation to monitor all youth programmes across the country and avoid duplicating support for young people.

There was also a Youth Information Portal to support information dissemination, while a health campaign, “RED MEANS STOP”, was launched to help fight the drug menace on the market.

He said challenges mitigating against the Ministry included underfunding of its programmes, and advocated that the 80 per cent communication service tax be allocated to the Ministry and its agencies.

He stated that per the law of the tax monies accrued from it is to support youth development and if all the money is given to us the National Youth Authority would come out with many youth employment models to help get the best out of the young people, adding that, “Unemployment is still high, so we need to find innovative ways to solving it.”

He said there was a need for collaboration between education and industry to resolve the long-standing mismatch between the two sectors, because some courses attract more students but offer no jobs.

Vice President Opoku-Agyemang, in a remark, expressed happiness for the establishment of the ministry and that she had no doubt about what good things the youth could do for the country.

“All they need is to give them a little bit of push, and we will see the amazing things they would do,” she said, adding that the youth of Ghana are very innovative, and she believed that the youth have a lot to offer the country.

She urged the ministry to collaborate with other ministries, and that her office was ready to support their work, saying, “The work we do dovetails into each other’s area, and there is nothing about my territory and your territory; it is about the territory of the country and the well-being of the people.”

She said that wherever one was put, whether in education, health, agriculture, industry, security, among others, the nation must take the central role in planning and the impact of work.

The Vice President asked the Ministry to factor into their planning the education of the youth who sell along the roadsides and truck pushers.

She asked the Ministry to pay attention to tracking the impact of measures they put in place to improve the lives of the youth, saying, “When we are able to measure the impact, then we will know how to sustain and expand our programmes.”

She called on researchers to help in this direction in the ministry’s planning.

The Vice President said she bore with the ministry’s budgetary constraints, but Ghanaians must be mindful of the debt settlement situation the government faced.

“We used so much money to pay debt, so we should be interested in ways in which we can grow the national pie – I'm not so much interested in apportioning what we have -I'm interested in ensuring that what we have gets bigger,” she stated.

She stressed, “So, growing the economy should be of paramount importance and taking good care of the people who will grow the economy, too, is also important.”

Touching on the drug menace, Vice President Naana Opoku-Agyemang called for intensified public education on the dangers of the products to protect the youth.