By Kekeli K. Blamey
Adidome (V/R) Oct. 05, GNA – Local ownership and deliberate grassroots implementation are critical to translating Ghana’s job creation policies into sustainable employment and enterprise opportunities, a development and management practitioner has said.
Mr Confidence E. Abotsi said the government’s flagship interventions, including the 24-Hour Economy and its Agro-Incentive Policy, Adwumawura, National Apprenticeship Programme, STEP-UP, FEED Ghana and the Rapid Industrialisation and Mini-Processing Plants agenda, presented significant opportunities that must be actively appropriated and implemented at the local level.
He said while the policies provided the national framework, local authorities, development practitioners, private-sector actors and community stakeholders had a responsibility to develop practical initiatives that responded to the specific economic potential and needs of their jurisdictions.
“We cannot wait all the time for the government to send us a package before we act. What we need first are the ideas, then the resource envelope to implement those ideas will follow. We must package the ideas,” he said.
Mr Abotsi made the observation following a series of engagements with sections of the youth in Central Tongu district on government policies and programmes designed to support start-ups, enterprise expansion and self-employment.
He said the engagements had revealed a highly motivated youth population eager to take advantage of emerging opportunities but stressed that enthusiasm alone would not guarantee sustainable enterprises.
He said technical and managerial capacity must be deliberately built into the design of job creation interventions to enable beneficiaries to establish, manage and sustain viable enterprises.
“Technical and management skill sets should be the prerequisite. You do not roll out programmes without first having a plan for technical and management capabilities,” he said.
Mr Abotsi mentioned that inadequate managerial and technical capacity remained a major risk to enterprise sustainability and could undermine the impact of otherwise well-intentioned public interventions.
He said lessons from previous policy-driven job creation initiatives should inform the design of current programmes, particularly in the areas of beneficiary selection, capacity building, financing, mentorship, monitoring and sustainability.
According to him, enterprise development should not be approached simply as the disbursement of funds or provision of equipment, but as a structured process requiring technical preparation, business management, access to markets, financing and continuous monitoring.
He said such an integrated approach would help to de-risk government-supported enterprises and improve their prospects of becoming sustainable sources of employment.
Mr Abotsi has consequently developed a three-volume technical concept note titled “Job Creation through Policy: A Blueprint for Ghana’s Industrial Transformation and Entrepreneurship,” which seeks to provide practical pathways for translating government’s job creation policies into locally implementable interventions.
The concept note, he said, was developed from his experience as a development practitioner with nearly two decades of involvement in project design and implementation across portfolios supported by the World Bank, European Union and Millennium Development Authority (MiDA).
He said it applied project management milestones, local governance principles and social accountability mechanisms to contemporary policy priorities, including the 24-Hour Economy, Local Economic Development (LED), Adwumawura, SME development, agribusiness and industrialisation.
The document, he indicated, contained practical proposals, potential financing sources, field-level execution mechanisms, measurable expected results, and sustainability strategies.
“The objective is not simply to propose ideas, but to demonstrate how those ideas can be converted into projects, financed, implemented, measured and sustained,” he said.
Mr Abotsi said the Volta Region, among other jurisdictions, possessed considerable potential for piloting locally driven enterprise and job creation interventions.
He said his direct field experience and previous work under the MiDA Commercialisation of Farmer-Based Organisations (CDFBO) programme provided useful insights into the economic opportunities, institutional structures and practical challenges within those areas.
Mr Abotsi stated that the concept note would be submitted to the President and relevant government institutions to stimulate policy dialogue and provide practical options for strengthening the implementation of the administration’s employment and enterprise development agenda.
He called for stronger collaboration between central government, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies, the private sector, development partners and local communities to ensure that national job creation policies produced measurable outcomes at the grassroots.
“Something is happening, but we can do better. We can be more intentional, more deliberate and more aggressive in giving effect to the policies of government on the ground,” he said.
He pledged his commitment to support efforts to translate government’s job creation policies into practical opportunities for young people and local enterprises, irrespective of whether he held a formal public position.
GNA
Edited by Maxwell Awumah /Kenneth Odeng Adade