By Solomon Gumah
Tamale, Jan. 24, GNA – YEFL Ghana, a youth development Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) in Northern Ghana, has commended President John Dramani Mahama for establishing the Ministry of Youth Development and Empowerment.
It said the call for a separate Ministry for the youth had been overdue partly due to the over concentration of the Youth and Sports Ministry on sports alone, whilst the National Youth Authority’s (NYA) programmatic focus had been short of its expectations.
This was contained in a statement issued by YEFL Ghana, signed by Madam Vera Jawol Magan, its Director and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Tamale.
The statement said, “In recent years, allocation to the Ministry of Sports, which leaned towards sports development and by extension the National Sports Authority, compared to the National Youth Authority (NYA) for youth related services, posed a worrying trend to holistic youth development.”
“In the last five years, the following allocations were made by the Ministry in terms of compensation and administration received were 41 per cent and peaking at 90 per cent in 2022, whereas youth services received two per cent, peaking at 23 per cent and sports development eight per cent and peaking at 39 per cent,” it said.
The statement said, “In spite of this trend, and following the introduction of the five per cent District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) to address funding deficits to NYA for youth-related services, the under resourced NYA continued to allocate substantial funds towards sports infrastructure development”.
It said, with the establishment of this Ministry to focus on addressing the challenges of the teaming young people of Ghana, there was now hopeful that the government would show greater commitment to youth development.”
Again, “We expect to experience and see a clear departure from the practice of pseudo-cosmetic youth empowerment interventions, clothed with beautiful names but with less resource commitment where in the last five years, the state only contributed 46 per cent of the total fund towards youth development and donor agencies augmenting that with 54 per cent financing,” it said.
The NGO encouraged the incoming Minister to pay close attention to the allocation and utilisation of the five per cent DACF by the NYA, consequently calling for close working
relationship with the DACF Secretariat, to eradicate bureaucratic delays in the release of funding to the NYA.
The statement expressed the willingness of YEFL Ghana to continue to offer its support and share knowledge and expertise to improve the sector.
GNA