NEIP to train two million student entrepreneurs

The National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP) is to train and stimulate at least two million students to become successful entrepreneurs in the next five years, Ms. Abigail Laryea, the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the NEIP, has announced.

The NEIP is flagship policy initiative of the government under the Ministry of Business Development with the primary objective of providing an integrated national support for start-ups and small businesses.

In the interim, Ms. Laryea said her outfit intends to reach out and train about 10,000 students in various Senior High and Tertiary institutions in the country by 2020, to be business inclined or oriented people, and support them with start-up capitals to begin their businesses.

She said entrepreneurship remains the key and reliable catalyst to address graduate and youth unemployment in the country, hence the need to create conducive environment and develop the interest of the upcoming generation to become entrepreneurs.

Ms. Laryea said this when she inaugurated the Sunyani Senior High School chapter of the School Entrepreneurship Initiative (SEI) Club in Sunyani over the weekend.

The club has 40 members, made up of mostly business students – boys and girls, but according to the Deputy CEO, students in other fields of study could join the club.

She said the NEIP would support the club or individual members to come out with creative, innovative, and feasible ideas that could be developed into business good plan.

On completion, she said interested students could obtain funding or start up capitals to start their own businesses to improve on their socio-economic livelihood.

“We want to bring the concept of entrepreneurship directly into the school setup as a means to develop the interest of students to go into the private sector after school”, she said.

Ms Laryea advised the students to be disciplined, study hard and avoid bad peers who could truncate their education and ruin their future.

Throwing more light on the concept of the SEI Club, Joseph Kumah Mackay, the Director, Monitoring and Evaluation of the NEIP, said the clubs were to be established in almost all the SHSs in the country, and would be extended to selected tertiary institutions.

He said the NEIP would establish business incubation hubs in the regional capitals and some district and municipalities which would support the clubs to develop feasible business plans.

Mackay said a national inter-club competition would be organized for the clubs to pitch business ideas saying the best club would have the opportunity to visit the Silicon Valley in the United States and the Tech City of the United Kingdom.

Michael Nsiah Agyapong, the Headmaster of the Sunyani SHS, lauded the NEIP saying its effective implementation would facilitate accelerated national development.

He thanked the NEIP for choosing the school, which had about 3,025 students adding that management would support them to ensure that the purpose of the club would be achieved.