Structures in place to create more jobs – President

Accra, Feb 8, – The Government would next month establish the Nation Builders Corps to employ 100,000 young persons, in 2018 alone, to assist in public sector service delivery in health, education, agriculture, sanitation and the revenue collection department of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

Additionally, it had put in place the structures to help small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) and budding entrepreneurs through the challenging start-up years, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated.

President Akufo-Addo, who was delivering the annual State of the Nation Address to Parliament, on Thursday, said the availability of cheaper credit was good news for businesses in general, and thus meant better prospects for jobs.

He said the Government had also launched the Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship Programme at the Accra Digital Centre; adding that, “This programme, with 10 regional training centres, has already recruited 3,000 young unemployed persons, to undergo a three-month all-expenses-paid training”.

“I am happy to announce that Ecobank Ghana Limited has already offered to engage all 3,000 young people, after the training programme. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

On the Daily Minimum Wage, the President said: “As a result of engagements with organised labour, we ensured that the National Daily Minimum Wage was determined and approved before the laying of the 2018 Budget Statement to Parliament by the Minister of Finance.”

He said there were no strike actions last year; declaring that, “We will continue the constructive dialogue with organised labour to find mutually satisfactory solutions to their concerns, in order to guarantee industrial peace”.

On public accountability, President Akufo-Addo said: “I believe it bears repeating here that, thanks to these boring figures, for the first time in a long while, we have been able to provide better budgetary support to the constitutionally-mandated institutions that hold government accountable; that is the Auditor-General, Parliament, Judiciary, Ministry of Justice, Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, the Economic and Organised Crime Office and the Police”.

He said the Government had been able to transfer some GH¢3.1 billion of Tier Two pension funds into the custodial accounts of the pension schemes of the labour unions, funds that had been outstanding for six years, and about which the labour unions had been loudly complaining.

GNA