NGO steps up youth entrepreneurship programme

Youth Empowerment for Life (YEfL) is to intensify its annual youth entrepreneurial training programme by visiting deprived communities to select promising and talented young people as beneficiaries.

Mr Salifu Mahama, Programmes Manager of YEfL, a youth development oriented non-governmental organization based in Northern Region, said this when addressing the opening of the 2014 Youth Forum organised by YEfL at Dalum in the Kumbungu District.

The forum, which was attended by YEfL’s youth centers across the Northern Region, was to deliberate on issues affecting the youth in the Region and chart a new path towards youth development.

Mr Mahama said there were a lot of promising and talented youth in the deprived communities but lacked the necessary mentorship to realise their potential hence the YEfL’s decision to reach out to them.

The entrepreneurial training programme seeks to promote and increase youth empowerment and employment as well as compliment government efforts towards reducing poverty in the region.

Under the programme, about 60 youth are selected and trained within a nine-month period on various entrepreneurial models after which they develop business proposals that are evaluated and the best 10 are given grants to start-up their own business.

Mr Mahama said “We try to educate them on some common traits of successful entrepreneur such as discipline, good communication skills, self-confidence, humility and self-motivation as well as build their capacity on packaging and branding, book-keeping, idea generation, how to access finance and identifying opportunities.”

He commended government for setting up the Youth Entrepreneurship Support Fund (YES Fund) and called for transparency in its disbursement to benefit all.

Mr Ziblim Shaibu, Northern Regional Director of the National Youth Authority, urged the youth to position themselves to take advantage of the opportunities being created by government to improve their lives.

Mr Shaibu urged the youth to eschew violence because such conditions did not promote investment and development.