GOVERNMENT WILL BE PROACTIVE ON YOUTH ISSUES (PAGE 28)

The Volta Regional Minister, Mr Joseph Amenowode, says the government will be proactive in addressing obstacles to the development of the youth.
He said constraints such as human resource and management skills, technology development and dissemination, infrastructure, market access, irrigation development and management would be tackled with zeal with the view to conscientising the youth in agriculture to lessen their migration to the urban areas in search of non-existent jobs.
Mr Amenowode said this when he addressed a sensitisation forum on the government’s project for youth in agriculture organised by the Volta Region chapter of the Ghana Trade and Livelihood Coalition (GTLC) at Ho last Tuesday.
The forum was aimed at enabling the youth to understand the implications of the government’s budget for 2009 in relation to the youth in agriculture.
The regional minister reaffirmed that the government was more than determined to give agriculture the requisite attention with a view to making it propel the socio-economic development of the nation.
He underscored the need to encourage farmers to diversify by way of cultivating cash crops and rearing of livestock for which they might have comparative advantage aside crop cultivation.
Mr Amenowode commended the GTLC for fashioning out a capacity building programme for women in agriculture, adding that hitherto majority of women had limited access to land, labour and capital due to cultural and institutional factors.
“Women for example cannot provide collateral for credit because they may not have legal ownership of tangible assets,” he said.
In an address, the regional coordinator of the National Youth Council (NYC), Mr Ransford Ocloo, said the youth should broaden their perception on agriculture from the machete and hoe of traditional farming methods to ventures like mushroom farming, snail rearing, fish farming, bee keeping and others, which did not attract very high seed capital.
He said it was time the youth discarded the notion that farming was a form of punishment because they were once punished in schools to weed overgrown grass on their compounds.
In a welcoming address, the regional focal person for GTLC, Reverend Alexander Avor, urged the government to put the necessary infrastructure in place for the youth to engage in fulling scale agribusiness.
He also said there was the need to improve on the economy to produce more food for local consumption and export in order to stabilise the local currency and its value on the world market, rather than importing rice, tomatoes and poultry products into the country, which eventually rendered the youth and women redundant in the production of food for the nation.
Rev. Avor advocated that the government should engage in a dialogue with donor agencies and development partners to support the youth with inputs.
He told participants to see the sensitisation forum and awareness creation as a leverage for the youth to see agribusiness as a lucrative venture and not as a business for school dropouts.
The chairman of the function was the regional officer of the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), Togbe Akliku Ahorney II, who said the participants should endeavour to start their ventures on a small scale, adding that the failure to do so was the bane to the growth from small-scale to medium-scale enterprises in the country.