EMPOWERING THE GHANAIAN YOUTH FOR ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT

EMPOWERING THE GHANAIAN YOUTH FOR ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT

Michael Owusu Tabiri

This article examines practical steps that must be taken to empower African youth for trans-generational accelerated and all round development. The data were generally gathered through questionnaires answered by 150 Ghanaian university students. It was found through administration of survey questionnaires that only a handful of the respondents had entrepreneurial and educational ambitions or goals after their University education. The synopsis of the findings is as follows: Employment focused ambitions-70%, Educational ambitions–20% and Entrepreneurial ambitions-10%. It was discovered that to ensure youth development, nurturing, training, equipping and empowering must be the principal pillars or stages to incorporate and harness tirelessly and diligently. It was also revealed that without equipping and empowering the youth educationally, economically and entrepreneurially, there cannot be any future development. The paper argues that empowerment leads to development. That is, a meaningful empowerment and equipping will automatically lead to sustainable accelerated development. The work contributes to the process of trans-generational development and empowerment that should definitely lead to sustainable national development as well as stressing the only panacea for juvenile delinquency. The paper proposes incorporation of mentorship and empowerment into Ghanaian tertiary institutions‟ programmes, as well as transforming the one year National Service to mandatory Mentorship and Empowerment for all graduates of tertiary institutions.

2018

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=c6aHdPkAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=c6aHdPkAAAAJ:IjCSPb-OGe4C

English