Youth say parents/guardians have little time for them - NDPC Report

One of the critical issues currently confronting the youth of Ghana is the limited attention that parents and guardians are giving to them, Dr Felix Addo-Yebo, Director of Policy Division at the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), has said.

He said in interactions with the youth, some of them had expressed concern about the little attention from their parents, who they do not see at home quiet often, and blamed them for not playing active roles in their development.

“Some of the youth are saying that they are not getting enough attention from their parents and guardians,” Dr Addo-Yebo, who is also the Coordinator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Implementing Coordination Committee (ICC) of the NDPC said.

He was speaking at a youth forum, organized in Accra on Monday by the NDPC, as part of its validation of Ghana’s report on the implementation of the SDGs, as the country prepares to go through the United Nation’s Voluntary National Review (VNR) process in July.

Dr Addo-Yebo, who made a presentation of Ghana’s SDGs implementation situation, said the youth had outlined a myriad of concerns that affected them as young people and wanted the government to address.

He said, in particular, issues of concern for the youth as gathered in the Ghana SDGs report being validated, included the low participation in policy decision by the youth, access to peace and security including vigilantism challenges; the low support for young entrepreneurs, increasing online fraud-Sakawa; inadequate opportunity for skills development, as well as the low knowledge of contraceptives among the youth.

He said a section of the Youth were also making a case for the reduction of the age of a person who could become the President of the nation from 40 years, and had said that age was discriminatory to the youth.

He said other issues of early marriages, high level of youth unemployment, children engaging in hazardous jobs, especially on the Volta Lake; and the issues of streetism, as critical development issues that needed urgent attention.

He also mentioned areas of the SDGs that concerned the youth as Goal 1- No Poverty; Goal 2- No Hunger; Goal 3-Good Health and Well-being; and Goal 4-Education.

He indicated that under the SDGs that affected the youth, Ghana as a country had excelled in some of the areas, including access to education by all, through Free SHS, increased access to health services and essential medicine, citing the drone system of delivering health essentials to remote parts, and the proportion of malnutrition that was declining steadily, saying however, that stunting was still high even though it was also declining.

Dr Addo-Yebo said children also continued to suffer more from poverty since they do not work and that three-third of Ghanaian children suffers multidimensional poverty.

He said there were issues of access to infrastructure at the schools which needed to be addressed to match the success gain at gender parity to education at the basic level and the general access to education.

The ICC held the youth forum, the first of the series of engagements with the general populace, to validate Ghana’s progress within the past four years, in implementing the SDGs.

Ghana would, be among 51 countries that would be reporting on their VNR of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the 2019 High Level Political Forum in New York, USA, this year.

The VNR facilitates the sharing of experiences and mutual learning to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the progress on implementation of the 17 SDGs the three cross-cutting themes on “youth engagement in SDG; leave no one behind;” and synergies across the goals.