Year: 2015
Grantee Highlight: Sixty-Nine Women Graduate from NEWIG’s Youth-in-Entrepreneurship Initiative
Grantee Highlight: Sixty-Nine Women Graduate from NEWIG’s Youth-in-Entrepreneurship Initiative
This story was originally posted on Graphic Online (Ghana)
Sixty-nine young women have graduated from a three-month intensive training in vocational skills under the Youth-in-Entrepreneurship initiative.
The initiative, which forms part of the Network of Women in Growth-Ghana’s (NEWIG) project, seeks to empower young women to be gainfully employed to make them self-reliant.
They were trained in bead making, basic catering, soap making, batik, tie-dye, floral arrangement, textile designing and basic financial management.
At an event held at Tefle in the Volta Region on October 2, 2015 on the theme, “Promoting sustainable economic development through skills training for women”, the young ladies were presented with tools that would help them set up their own businesses.
The Executive Director of NEWIG, Mrs Mawusi Nudekor Awity, announced that approximately $21,000 was used in the training programme.
“Things haven’t been easy. But we believe in squeezing water out of stones to empower these young ladies. Of course, we received support from Empower, British High Commission, Crossroads International, and African Women’s Development Fund,” she said.
Mrs Awity said the NEWIG initiative used local raw materials such as coconut, cocoa pods, shea butter, paper, empty sachet water packets to create products.
According to her, there is the need to encourage the setting up of cottage industries in parts of the country, to propagate the idea of domestication through patronage of local produce.
A Senior Field Officer of NEWIG, Ms Naomi Biney, said NEWIG had a monitoring mechanism to help the graduates grow their businesses.
For his part, the Head of Rural Enterprise Programmes at Sogakope, Mr Eric Batse, said: “Small Scale Enterprises (SMEs) account for 90 per cent of the total operations in the industrial sector and offer 58 per cent of employment in the country.”
He said encouraging the growth of SMEs was a viable means of tackling the growing unemployment problem in the country.
Meanwhile, the District Coordinating Director for South Tongu, Mrs Jemima Apedo, has underscored the need for attitudinal change on the part of some Ghanaians who have insatiable taste for foreign produce, which she described as a bane of local economic growth.
The Last Days of This Ebola Outbreak are As Much about Access to Information as Access to Healthcare
The Last Days of This Ebola Outbreak are As Much about Access to Information as Access to Healthcare
Read published article here: on Qz.com
BY Amba Mpoke-Bigg
Nurse Mariatu Fofana says she should have known better than to touch and hug her father as he lay dying at his home near the capital of Sierra Leone, but she has paid an unbearable price for her error.
It also means that information campaigns to educate the public in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are far from over.
At the height of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, Media Matters for Women, a journalist-led non-profit organization deployed Bluetooth technology to provide critical information to women and girls.
Even though new cases of Ebola have dwindled almost to zero many women say they are still fighting an uphill battle against the basic social deficiencies that allowed the virus to spread with ease.
These include ignorance and traditional practices but inadequate access to basic health care also played a huge part.
For a cash-strapped country like Sierra Leone, the long term answer could lie in community ownership of health care through organizations such as German Kooperation Sierra Leone (GECKO), said Baba Car Conteh, a psycho-social worker who works with Ebola survivors in the southwestern Sierra Leone town of Port Loko.