Ho, July 14, GNA – Compassion International Ghana (CIG), a child and youth development organisation as part of its efforts to fulfill its vision of supporting the youth with structured programmes, has developed a Youth Development Strategy (YDS) to address the holistic development needs of the youth.
It was also developed to outline approaches that would help its Frontline Partner Churches (FCPs) to address the challenges youth beneficiaries face at their various centres and the nation at large.
The YDS, which was titled “Youth Development! Impacting Lives Through Real Experience” was sighted by the Ghana News Agency in Ho on Monday.
Its strategic goal is to empower the youth as agents of change in their families and communities.
It said CIGH in partnership with its FCPs would create an enabling environment for the youth to reach their full God-given potential.
It would identify and nurture their innate talents, skills and knowledge for them to become useful to society.
The YDS noted that the present generation of Ghanaian youth face many difficult challenges that affect their quality of life and ability to reach their full God-given potential.
It identified some of the challenges as inadequate tutors with relevant skills in youth development leading to inadequate tutelage and inadequate mentoring opportunities, which led to weak moral, social, cultural and religious values in the youth.
Others, it said, were negative peer influence resulting in uninformed choices, unemployment and underemployment resulting from inadequate and inappropriate training for the job market.
The YDS also identified attrition of patriotism and communal service and inadequate opportunities for youth participation in decision making.
It encouraged its partner FCPs to implement youth targeted development interventions.
“Invest the needed resources in the lives of the youth to release them from poverty to enable them make progress towards the attainment of holistic development outcomes, thereby broadening their view of the future to become agents of change,” it said.
The document noted that poverty was the greatest barrier to education for the youth to reach their full God-given potential.
It identified the inability of the country’s educational structure to train and imbibe entrepreneurship and vocational skills in students, especially those who were unable to thrive within the formal systems.
The YDS intimated that the purpose of Technical and Vocational Education and Training was to equip people with the technical and professional skills needed for socioeconomic and industrial development.
It therefore said CIGH would assist the FCPs to promote TVET sensitization at the JHS and SHS levels to help them make informed choices for further education and training.
It hinted that CIGH would allocate resources to the local churches for the implementation of its programmes as well as set up monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for tracking measurable outcomes.
CIGH partners 370 local churches in 10 out of the 16 regions of the country.
Its mandate is to facilitate the implementation of programmes focused on holistic development of its beneficiaries in four main domains of spiritual, cognitive, socio-emotional and physical aspects of development.
It has 92,318 registered beneficiaries as at May, 2020, out of which 41,443 are youth, representing 44.9 percent of the beneficiaries.
Out of the 41,443 youth, 15,101 are in JHS, 10,790 are in SHS, 2,048 are Vocational students, 1,563 are in tertiary institutions, while 11,941 are engaged in other forms of training.
GNA