Eastern/Volta AGI launches GYER to promote SDG’s

The Eastern and Volta Regional branch of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) has launched the Ghana Young Entrepreneurs Roundtable (GYER) on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The program seeks to engage, discuss and facilitate public efforts to achieve measurable outcomes toward the nationally determined contributions to the SDGs in alignment with the global development strides.

The initiative is aimed at building a core group of young business leaders to spearhead regional integration of SDG’s into private sector growth strategies.

Speaking at the official launch, the Special Advisor to the President on SDGs, Dr Eugene Owusu, said the initiative has fulfilled a key aspiration pillar of the SDGs, which is youth inclusion and leaving no one behind, adding that it was consistent with three of the priorities that drove the President’s advocacy on the SDGs on the private sector, innovation and the youth.

He said according to a study by the United Nation Development Programme(UNDP), more than one third of the SDG’s targeted young people and there were 20 youth-specific targets spread over six key SDG’s, including hunger, education, gender equality, decent work, inequality and climate change.

He expressed the belief that there were five key areas that readily lend themselves to scaling up youth initiatives to underpin rapid socio economic transformation and the achievement of the SDGs.

These areas, he said, were the involvement of the youth in agriculture, support for entrepreneurship, appropriate education and skills training, public-private partnership to boost employment and ICT and Innovation.

Dr Owusu called on all stakeholders to collaborate to ensure accelerated implementation of the SDGs, adding that everyone has to do their utmost best to make it happen by achieving the goals and prosperity for all.

A Technical Economic Advisor to the Vice President, Dr Kojo Frimpong said, statistics emanating suggested that only 30 percent of National Service Personnel who graduated annually were able to gain employment within one year after completing their service.

This, he believed was that if all graduates were able to put up an initiative and get some funding, they will be able to create jobs for themselves, expand and employ others and help reduce unemployment.

The Economic Advisor, to UNDP, Ms Radhika Lal, commended Ghana for doing well in some areas of the SDGs, however, she said there was more to be done particularly in the areas of sanitation, reducing poverty, job creation and maternal mortality.

The Chairman of the Eastern and Volta Regional branch of AGI, Mr Dela Gadzanku, said this initiative was geared towards heightening the public’s awareness of the relevance of encouraging governments sensitivity to the SDG’s and scale up the national drive toward sustaining the growth across major sectors of the economy.

As part of the launch, there was a symbolic tree planting at the Akwamuman Senior High School, where four trees were planted in front of the school.