Accra, April 20, GNA - Mr Clement Kofi Humado, Minister of Youth and Sports, on Wednesday said there was the need to adopt bold and new initiatives to attract non-governmental funding to enhance youth work. He said government alone could not make the desired impact in providing the needs of the youth in view of the competing demands from other sectors of the economy.

Mr Humado was addressing the Management and Board of the National Youth Authority (NYA) to acquaint himself with their activities and discuss government's vision and the role they are expected to play to achieve the vision.

He stated that the government considered the development of the youth to be of extreme importance and that explained the formulation of the National Youth Policy in August last year. Mr Humado said with the Policy in place it was now the responsibility of agencies under the Ministry to ensure that the Action Plan was implemented to achieve the vision for youth development.

He called on the agencies to provide practical and easily workable methods of implementing those action plans to improve on the welfare of the youth.

He urged them to enact a workable and appropriate National Youth Authority Bill to remove all obstacles confronting youth workers and enhance their activities.

The Minister observed that at the moment NRC Decree 241 (1974) was the law governing the operations of youth work, which he said, was outmoded since youth work was dynamic. Mr Humado stressed the need to synchronize the activities and other programmes to make them result oriented adding; 93we need to pull our resources to deliver services more effectively and avoid duplication of efforts".

The Minister noted that the National Youth Employment Programme models in education and agriculture for example, should be synchronized with the leadership skills training institutes' courses. Mrs Sedina Tamakloe-Attionu, Acting National Co-ordinator of the National Youth Authority, stressed the need for the Authority to become the leader in agenda setting for youth development. She said the Board and Management would streamline operations and restructure the Authority to include the creation of regional and district committees.

She called for entrepreneurship development and the empowerment of the youth to create employment opportunities for themselves by forming youth companies and promotion of various co-operative concepts, which could be achieved through collaboration with corporate Ghana, multinationals and the strengthening of relationship with development partners.

Madam Esther Cobbah, Chairperson of the Board, said youth development would best be achieved through private public partnership and called for the active involvement of all other stakeholders. 20 April 11