Kufuor’s legacy NYEP is two years

PRESIDENT John Agyekum Kufuor launched the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) to bring hope to the unemployed youth of Ghana.
The programme launched at the Kawokudi Park in Accra is now two years and has employed nearly 109,000 youth. Its target is to employ 500,000 youth.
When the programme was launched in October 2006, the youth of the country were hopeful of witnessing a milestone in their lives in and making a decent living.
First, it is important for the good people of this country to know that the creation of the NYEP went through various processes and consultations before it became what it is today.
In the early days of the New Patriotic Party administration, the government put in place a programme in which nearly 900,000 unemployed youth in the country were made to register in order to have a fair idea about the number of unemployed people.
This move attracted scathing criticisms from opposition parties which thought it was going to deceive the youth of the country into believing that the government had what it took to resolve the unemployment situation.
Out of that registration exercise, the government developed the Skills Training and Employment Placement (STEP) to give readily employable skills to the youth with the purpose of providing them job opportunities.
After the creation of the STEP, the government proceeded to introduce the Technical, Vocational and Education Training Testing (TVET) programme to enhance the technical and vocational skills of the youth and make them more competitive to support the country's human resource base.
Following a presidential directive within the framework of the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy II, the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment put in place a National Employment Task Force in partnership with the National Security to put together a comprehensive youth employment programme. This was to ensure job creation for the youth in various fields of endeavour.
That set the basis for the formal introduction of the NYEP to empower the youth to contribute their quota to national development.
Designed to target the youth who are defined in a draft National Youth Policy document, the NYEP has been developed into a ten-module programme with each employing varying numbers of people with specific job definitions.

Modules
The modules under the first phase of the NYEP comprise Waste and Sanitation, Health Extension Workers (HEW), Youth in Agribusiness (crop/non-crop), Community Teaching Assistants and Paid Internship and Industrial Attachment, Vacation Jobs, Volunteer Services and Community Protection Unit.
To effectively implement the programme, a National Employment Task Force with a National Co-ordinator and deputies responsible for the regions, a Regional Monitoring Team and a District Employment Task Force headed by a District Employment Co-ordinator were established.
For waste and sanitation, the objective is to contribute to the maintenance of clean public facilities and healthy households to ensure the availability of a strong and healthy households for the citizenry.
The module includes assisting the district environmental and health teams and heads of institutions, community leaders and non-governmental organisations that have an interest to maintain a clean healthy environment for their communities.
The operations of Zoomlion, a waste management organisation, is a typical example.
The HEW module which has employed about 15, 000 people has the objective of assisting health professionals to discharge basic support services at health institutions such as hospitals, health posts and clinics, especially in the rural communities, to ensure access to basic health care.
Beneficiaries under this module are also involved in undertaking public health education and hygienic health campaigns at the community level.
The Agribusiness module has employed about 16,383 youth as of April 2008 in agriculture related activities and ventures with the view to encouraging them to take up agriculture as an occupation.
The agricultural activities for the youth under the module are selected based on the relative natural comparative advantages of each district. It has been made flexible such that each District Employment Task Force could decide which has the most potential to provide sustainable development to as many youth in that locality as possible.
The Community Teaching Assistants Module, which has the highest number of employed youth of about 33, 000, has created for the youth (with at least second cycle level education) the ability to deliver pre and basic school level training in the rural areas with the lack of teachers .
The Paid Internship and Industrial Attachment module which has about 6,000 employees as of April this year, has also engaged trainees and undergraduates doing semi-professional courses at various levels of secondary and tertiary institutions.
Potential student trainees under this module register with the NYEP requesting internship or industrial attachment.
Under the vacation jobs module, students in both first cycle and tertiary institutions during vacations are offered employment opportunities to earn income.
With the Volunteer Services module, the programme provides opportunities for young men and women who want to provide services to communities on voluntary basis as a means of adding value to the socio-economic development of Ghana to do so.
Finally, the Community Protection Unit module was put in place to enhance safety and security in the local communities that are noted for recording high armed robbery cases.
It is made up of young men and women who are engaged to support the law enforcement agencies, particularly the Police Service, in maintaining law and order.
Employees under the module receive one month basic training in Community Protection related fields at the various Police Training Schools in the country in readiness for the task ahead.
They also serve as traffic wardens in the big cities to help manage traffic.
More modules are in the offing to further expand the NYEP to include providing employable skills for basic school dropouts in the country.
They are Youth in Information Communication Technology (ICT), which will provide employment for the youth by developing and sustaining a pool of knowledgeable ICT youth workforce in Ghana.
Others are Youth in Mining and Construction, aimed at empowering the youth in the mining areas by providing them employable skills in that sector and a Trades and Vocation module which is expected to employ about 100,000 youth nationwide by empowering them economically to engage in self-employment ventures.

Challenges
Since the introduction of the programme, funding to pay beneficiaries has not been regular and that is a source of worry to many concerned youth.
The delay, until recently, generated threats of demonstrations by beneficiaries who registered their dissatisfaction with the delay of their monthly allowances.
The NYEP receives its funding from a pool of institutions which are the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the Investment Fund, the Road Fund, the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), the District Assembly’s Common Fund and the HIPC funds.
The delay is attributed to the fact that each of these funding sources receive their funds from the government on quarterly basis before it could contribute the pool for the NYEP to pay its employees.
Following that problem the government through the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment early this year signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) for the bank to manage the finances of the NYEP.
Under the MoU, accounts have been opened for all NYEP employees in all ADB branches and other community banks in the country where employee accounts would be credited at the end of each month following which the government would reimburse the bank after every quarter.
The introduction of the Communication Service Tax (talk tax) is also expected to serve as a dedicated source of funding to the NYEP.
Many youth of Ghana are hoping that after the cash flow problems have been streamlined more people would be engaged under the expected modules to be able to employ the targeted 500,000.