Commonwealth Day 2024: Students urged to embrace, cultivate and practice good values for national development

By Stanley Senya

Accra, March 14, GNA – Ms Mina Mensah, Director of The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Africa Office, has charged students to embrace, cultivate and practice good moral values for national development.

She said children upholding positive world values such as human rights, humility, patriotism, good governance, accountability and respect for women, among others, would help promote cohesion in culturally diverse countries in the Commonwealth.

Ms Mensah was speaking at an engagement with the students of Roman Ridge School in Accra to mark the 2024 Commonwealth Day Celebrations.

This year’s Commonwealth Day Celebrations was on the theme: “One Resilient Common Future.”

The engagement formed part of efforts to encourage the young people to realise their roles as future leaders and take an active part in shaping a sustainable and peaceful common future for upcoming generations.

She said as future leaders, the youth were expected to serve as agents of change as part of efforts towards reorienting the attitudes of young people to consolidate democratic rule for a better world.

This, she said, could be realised if students studied harder to broaden their scope of knowledge and embrace these positive values enacted by the Commonwealth.

The Director said imbibing positive values in students would help them understand and push the value of the commonwealth forward.

She said Ghana was a member of the Commonwealth and there was the need for the upcoming generations to know about it.

Ms Pamela Bassah, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Diaspora Relations, British High Commission in Ghana, said it was important to work together as Commonwealth Nations to build capacities, share common goals for economic development across the world.

“The issues of the world cannot be solved in a vacuum since we are interconnected by shared values, therefore we should leverage on existing networks to make the world a better place for all,” she added.

Miss Tanefa Asem, Lower 6 West Student of the Roman Ridge School, urged the Commonwealth to educate and invest into every country despite their level of development.

She said this can be done when expertise from develop countries assist underdeveloped and developing countries move from coal power to solar power generation of electricity.

Jasman Malick, Lower 6 ATIFI Student, also added that the Commonwealth should initiate a national policy on “being the change you want” to serve as a base for good moral conduct among commonwealth countries.

The CHRI has been implementing various activities annually to mark the celebration by Member States of the Commonwealth on the second Monday of March every year, to promote the understanding on global issues, international co-operation and the work of the Commonwealth.

GNA