The entrepreneurs, who are into Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality of the Upper East Region, were taken through topics like product and service development and entrepreneurial skills.

They were also empowered with skills in decision making, forms of business ownership, planning tools for business, promotional tools, Communication Skills and Customer Care and Risk Management.

The Executive Director of CENSODEV, Mr Braimah Sanjage , at the closing ceremony, said apart from the training component, another major intervention  was to help the beneficiaries to develop business plans to secure start-up capitals for their project.

He said the project would help link the beneficiaries to market their products by establishing website to serve as a major platform to market their products.“As part of the project implementation, the project will establish a business start-up centre for those of you finding it difficult to set up your outfit and also conduct couching sessions to your shops and marketing centres to see progress with your businesses and to offer you some technical advice if there are challenges to improve your operations,” he added.

He said the NGO received sponsorship from Self Help Activation Responsibility Empowerment (SHARE) Foundation, a charitable organisation  in Germany, to organise the training programme. Dr John Bosco Azigwe, the Training Consultant, contested the opinion that unemployment was prevalent and said there were a number of opportunities that people who claimed were unemployed could exploit.

He said what was important was that one needed to study the needs of the environment and acquire some level of entrepreneurial skills through the “Experiential model” to enable him or her to set up businesses. Mr Kizito Akanyomse, the Municipal Assistant Director at the Ghana Education Service in charge of Planning and Development, said countries that had succeeded in terms of development had relied on vocational and technical training.

He said it was against this backdrop that the Government, together with stakeholders in education, was laying more emphasis on vocational and technical education.

Mr Alhassan Abdual-Baqi, the Assistant Development Officer of the Kassena-Nankana Municipal Assembly, who commended the NGO and SHARE Foundation for implementing the project, said government was overwhelmed with development challenges.

He expressed optimism that the empowerment of the young entrepreneurs with skills would help complement government’s effort at job creation for the people, particularly the youth.