Ashanti Region has a youthful population - Dr. Osei Bonsu

Dr Nicholas Osei- Bonsu, the Ashanti Regional Deputy Director of Birth and Death Registry, has described the Region's population as youthful and called for proactive government policies which will target the development of the youth to reduce the dependency ratio in the Region.

He said there was a yawning percentage disparity of births of the 0-45 age bracket over deaths recorded from 2013 to the first quarter of 2015, which pointed to this fact.

Dr Osei Bonsu said available statistics puts registered births for the period at 94 percent as against only six percent of deaths in the same period.

The Deputy Director who made this known to the Ghana News Agency in Kumasi, gave the number of registered births from 2013 to the first quarter of 2015 as 364,459 while the number for the period under review for registered deaths summed up to 24,034.

He, therefore, suggested to the government to empower the youth to come up with lucrative jobs, by providing them with the start-up cash and other resources they would need.

This he said would help reduce the growing crime wave.