Over 4,000 youths employed in Upper West

Wa, Dec. 13, GNA - About 4, 378 unemployed youths in the Upper West Region have been given a temporary economic relief through their engagement in the various modules of the National Youth Employment Programme initiated by the government recently to address the unemployment problem in the country.

Out of the number, 2,068 of them went into crop cultivation, education catered for 1,590, auxiliary nursing took 520 and 200 were absorbed by the Zoom Lion Company Limited under its sanitation programme.

Mr. Mohammed Abudulai Sidik, Regional Liaison Officer of the programme who gave these statistics in an interview with the Ghana News agency at Wa on Wednesday, said the jobs were not permanent but only meant to assist Senior and Junior Secondary School products to push ahead in life.

He said those who went into crop production cultivated a total of about 2,500 hectares of various species of maize spread across the eight districts of the region during the farming season that had just ended. Despite the late take-off of the Agricultural component of the programme, which was in early July, Mr Sidik said an inspection carried out by his outfit showed that the Sissala East, Sissala West, Wa East and Wa West recorded good harvests.

On the sanitation programme, he said 25 more workers would be needed to bring the total number of youths engaged in that sector to 50 in each district.

He however, stated that the auxiliary nursing module was yet to take off fully in the region because of the training involved, saying it would be very costly to bring all of them to a central location to undertake the training.

Community policing would soon begin on pilot basis in one district in each region and to that end, he said, a training programme would begin on December 19, at the Police Traning Depot at Pwalgu in the Upper East Region for those in the northern regions.