The Executive Director of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (NEIP), Lawyer John Kuma, has disclosed that his outfit will in the last quarter of the year collaborate with the religious bodies to train about 200,000 people.
Already, the NPP has been able to train over 45,000 people on the NEIP and is optimistic that they can do more to help Ghanaians.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta during the mid-year budget stated the need for the NEIP to collaborate with the religious bodies amid coronavirus pandemic to encourage, train and also provide financial support to people.
In spite of that, the CEO of the NEIP has affirmed that they are going to train about 200,000 people from the religious bodies at church premises in the bid to support those in the sector.
The NEIP Programme was established by His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo under the Ministry of Business Development in 2017; with a seed capital of 10 million dollars and were tasked to raise 100 million and according to the CEO they have been able to raise about 80 million extra.
The program during the National Democratic Congress (NDC) term of office was known to be Youth Enterprise Support but got it to name changed under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to NEIP.
Speaking on Atinka TV, he explained that the government in the bid to assists the youth and Ghanaians to begin their own work, introduced the NEIP to provide training and offer support to the youth in ensuring that unemployment rate reduces.
He noted further that, after commencing the program in 2017, they had 7,000 applications and proceeded to train the entire number of people and subsequently gave 1,350 financial support. He indicated that, during the NDC’s eight years in office, the Youth Enterprise Support (YES) trained 103 individuals and gave 66 financial support.
According to him, after an online application in the second window, 12,000 people applied and were trained where 3,000 got support from the NEIP.
He said, a session of Ghanaians expressed concerns about the difficulties they go through in applying for the program and for that matter, the President, Nana Addo asked the leadership of the NEIP to train 100 individuals from the various district assemblies.
However, in the 260 districts in the country, they are trained 26,000 people with 5,000 getting financial support from the government.
He added that due to the good work of the NEIP in the past three years the unemployment has reduced from 15% to 7.3% and is of the view government is on course to get rid of unemployment in the country.
Touching on education, he said, “Now that SHS is free, students must not graduate without one technical skill. We should a way to integrate skills into our education. Students must be able to have a background in technical education. It will be better if every student gets one practical skill before graduating to become whatever he or she wants”
He said, government’s effort to improve education is not enough and has implored them to make technical education key so that SHS graduates can also have something better to do even when there is no white-collar job.
