By Laudia Sawer, GNA
Tema, Oct. 04, GNA – The SOS Children’s Villages in Ghana, in partnership with DHL Express Ghana, has organised its 2025 GoTeach Employability and Entrepreneurial Skills Boot Camp in Tema.
The five-day boot camp brought together 60 young people made up of 30 females and 30 males, drawn from SOS Children’s Villages Ghana programme locations at Tema, Asiakwa, Kumasi and Tamale for the programme on the theme: “Empowering Young People with Employability and Entrepreneurial Skills for Evolving Work Environments.”
The GoTeach Boot Camp is a flagship youth development initiative that seeks to empower young people with critical employability and entrepreneurial skills to thrive in today’s evolving work environment.
It featured interactive training sessions, mentorship, curriculum vitae writing, and a career fair facilitated by professionals and SOS’ partner organisations.
Its key areas of focus included career development, leadership, entrepreneurship, innovation, time management, environmental sustainability, and life skills.
Mr Godknows Kporha, the SOS National Youth Development Advisor for Ghana, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said SOS had several programmes they executed, of which the youth empowerment camp was one, aimed at empowering the youth to become self-reliant.
Mr Kporha said it provided participants with the platform to learn to become self-dependent and acquire skills such as employability, entrepreneurial skills development, life skills, leadership role development, sexual and reproductive health, as well as mental health education to prepare them for the future.
“Every year we organise these boot camp meetings, which we have segmented into three phases; the first one focuses on the young people in junior high schools. We take them through life skills and career orientation to prepare them for their second cycle institution to be able to choose careers based on their interest, their ability and the job market,” he said.
He said the second phase focused on the senior high students who undergo career planning and development, educating them on how to choose their careers without following the masses, and this involved career exploration, choice, orientation, planning and development.
The third phase, he said, was ‘GoTeach,’ which focused on providing tertiary students with employability and entrepreneurial skills, to help them transition from school to the field of work.
Mr Kporha stated that looking at the high rate of unemployed graduates in the system, the youth could be equipped to prevent them from falling victim to the situation or add to the population of the unemployment figures.
He said it was in this light that his outfit came up with the initiative to have such training programmes, to equip the youth to do something for themselves after completing school.
He explained that to achieve this, they went into partnership with DHL in 2012 under their corporate social responsibilities and were supported by Amali Tech, Africa ICT Right Learning Organisation, and Future Careers, among others.
Mrs Josephine Aryeetey, the GoTeach Ambassador for Ghana, said DHL Express was a company that connect people and improve lives, respectively, through the packages people send through the company and by improving lives, they served in the communities and countries in which they operated.
Mrs Aryeetey said they were partnering with SOS because they saw that the children’s village was doing something that was in line with what the company wanted to do for the communities, stressing that it was important to support the young people for the evolving work environment.
She said it was a commitment from DHL globally to support the mission of empowering the youth to get employability skills, stating that over the years, those who had participated in the boot camp had become great entrepreneurs or had secured jobs in partnering institutions.
Some participants expressed joy and gratitude to the organisers for the skills they acquired, indicating that they would be prepared for the future.
GNA
Edited by Christabel Addo