-The youth have been advised to stop spending money on expensive mobile phones and living expensive life styles to be able to save and create employment for themselves after school.
Mr Chris Bluku, Proprietor of Chris Café, a restaurant chain in the Eastern and Greater Accra regions, gave the advice at a lecture to mark this year's Global Entrepreneurship Week celebration at the Koforidua Polytechnic and the Koforidua Islamic Senior High School.
The programme was organized by the Youth Enhancement International and was sponsored by the Local Enterprise and Skills Development Programme (LESDEP).
Mr Bluku, a product of Accra Polytechnic, started his business with two cedis in 1983 at Accra New Town before expanding them to other parts of Accra and then to the Eastern Region.
He reminded the students that the future was “not five or ten years ahead” but just a few seconds away.
He said any decision that they took at any given moment would determine what they would be and where they would be the next moment.
Mr Bluku advised the students to start their businesses on a small scale to grow and seek sufficient information about any business that they want to invest in before starting.
"Do not start a business if you are not sufficiently informed about the business," he said and urged the students to cultivate good customer relationship for their businesses to grow.
Ms Bernice Gligah, lecturer at the Koforidua Polytechnic, said the world is in an entrepreneurship revolution and nobody or community could afford to be left out.
She reminded the students that the days when school graduates put their certificates in files and marched from one office to the other expecting to be employed was over, and that they should start thinking about employing themselves to create jobs for others.
Dr Smile Dzisi, Senior Lecturer at the Koforidua Polytechnic, advised the students to start planning for their lives right from school.
He reminded them that if others started small business and gradually grew them to big establishments, then every determined business minded fellow could also do the same.
The Eastern Regional Coordinator of the LESDEP, Mrs Fatahiya Zulka, called on graduates not to join the Graduate Unemployed Association but to join the LESDEP programme to help them to put their ideas into production.
She explained that often young people have great ideas but their challenge was how to raise the initial capital to start up and so the LESDEP programme was introduced to support the young entrepreneurs in the form of tools and equipment on loan for the beneficiaries to pay gradually.
She said by the end of June this year, over 2,000 people in the Eastern Region had benefitted from the LESDEP programme and some of the beneficiaries had set up their own companies with some employing more people.