Government supports trainees with six billion cedis

Cape Coast, April 11, GNA - Alhaji Abubakar Sadique Boniface, the Minister of Manpower, Youth and Employment, has said the government would spend six billion cedis to support 15,000 youth undergoing training for the Health Extension Workers Module (HEWM) of the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP).

Each of the trainees would be paid a monthly stipend of 400,000 cedis during their six months' training.

Alhaji Boniface said this when he met trainees in Cape Coast at the beginning of a two-day visit to the Central Region that will take him to all the 13 districts of the region.

The minister appealed to the trainees to consider the huge sum of money the government was spending on the programme and take their studies seriously.

He advised them to take the opportunity being offered them to better their grades in the senior secondary school examination to enable them to enrol into nurses training colleges to become professional nurses. Alhaji Boniface said out of the 10 modules of the NYEP, the HEWM was the most sensitive because it deals with human lives and therefore advised the trainees to listen attentively to their facilitators to enable them to live up to expectation.

He cautioned them that they were the pioneers of the programme and for that matter its success or failure depended on the seriousness they attached to their studies. "You should strive to become th e role models of the module so as to attract others to follow your footsteps".

In his response to a question during a forum, the minister said since the selection of the beneficiaries of all the modules was non-partisan and cuts across all shades of political opinion, he was confident that no party that comes to power in future would abolish the NYEP.

Mr Awankua Filson, the Cape Coast Municipal Employment Co-ordinator, said 300 youth applied for the HEWM and after screening, 77 were selected. The minister also met trainees from the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem, Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese and Mfantsiman districts.