The newly appointed municipal and district
coordinators of the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP), in the nine districts of the Upper East Region, were advised to carry out their duty with diligence to avoid being fired.
Mr. Abuga Pele, National Coordinating Director of the NYEP, who gave the warning, emphasized that the Government attached a lot of importance to the programme to arrest the unemployment situation especially among the youth.
He said it was not true that people recruited under the programme were up to 10,000 since majority of them had left for school and elsewhere.
Speaking at an orientation workshop for the coordinators on Tuesday, Mr Pele said it had been revealed that there were a lot of ghost names on the pay vouchers of the programme and some managers were exploiting the situation to their advantage.
He urged the coordinators to ensure that ghost names were deleted from the list by the end of December to pave way for new ones to be recruited adding that the longest one could stay with the programme was two years.
Mr Pele said 40,000 youth would be recruited into the programme this year in areas including Health, Community Policing, Prison, Immigration, ICT and Youth in Agriculture.
Mr. Mark Woyongo, Upper East Regional Minister, told the newly appointed coordinators that they would not only be monitored by the NYEP
directorate but the Regional Coordinating Council as well, to ensure sanity.
He noted that the NYEP had come as a blessing to the region especially the Youth in Agriculture programme since it would help curtail their migration to the southern sector and help reduce poverty in the area.
Mr Wayongo urged the youth to take advantage of the programme, saying that those in the Youth in Agriculture Programme would be provided with
technical advice and logistics by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to farm along the White and Red Volta.
He said a large scale of land had been cultivated and planted with rice that would serve as the food basket for the region and the country.
He said he had given directive to municipal and district assemblies in the region to purchase surplus rice during the harvest season which would be stored and later sold at affordable prices.