Day: March 6, 2024

Entrepreneurs, who benefitted from the government’s Ghana Skill’s Development Fund (GSDF), have commenced capacity building training for their employees.

The training is aimed at addressing skills deficit of employees through grants provided under the GSDF.

Beneficiaries of the fund are required to select which aspect of their enterprises and production processes they needed to improve and select a window that would be suitable.

The windows under the fund include the informal sector, the formal sector, training and innovation, greening grants, science, and technology.

Among the beneficiaries of the GSDF was Mrs.

Sylvia Fafali Orou, the Business Director of Faivich Enterprise, who chose to use the grant accessed to organise a capacity-building programme for her staff.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, she said her decision to engage her staff in a capacity-building programme was conceived due to the skills deficit of her employees.

‘When we accessed the grant, we decided to build the capacity
of our staff. A lot of people want to work, but they may not have the necessary skills, and we still need to employ them.

‘Once you have them on board, as business owners, we need to keep training our employees in order to improve their potential. We think the grant from the GSD fund will help us in that regard,’ she said.

She underscored the relevance of capacity building to the success of start-ups, saying the capacity building of employees enabled them to meet the demands of customers and business owners alike.

The GSDF is embedded in the government’s Technical, Vocational, and Educational Training (TVET) policy, which has the objective of creating jobs and increasing the competitiveness of the skilled workforce.

The programme is also aimed at raising the income-earning capacities of people, especially women and low-income groups.

Participants in the capacity-building programme were taken through management and administrative training courses, including time management skills, how to set individual an
d organisational goals, business etiquette, and emotional intelligence.

The organisation was assigned a service provider who trained the employees of the company.

Mrs. Emma Addo-Owusu, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Kobdam Image Consultancy and a service provider to Faivich Enterprise under the GSDF, commended the enterprise for choosing a capacity-building programme among other models.

She bemoaned the absence of capacity-building among the staff of many start-ups.

The absence of capacity, she noted, compromised the ability of the staff of start-ups to deliver in their respective roles, which often denied start-ups significant revenue and production losses.

She said capacity building enabled the staff of start-ups to have a better appreciation of the demands of customers and improve the administrative and production processes.

Government has earmarked about $60 million for disbursement over a five-year period with at least 700 entrepreneurs expected to access grants through the fund.

Source: Ghana
News Agency

The Ministry of National Security has educated Western North residents on the ‘see something, say something’, campaign, with a call on them to be Security conscious in their daily activities.

The four-day engagement enabled officials from the Ministry to interact with traditional authorities, opinion leaders, students in the second cycle and tertiary institutions, drivers and churches, among others and visited marketplaces and lorry stations.

The ministry also embarked on discussions on local radio stations in the region.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency, Mrs Akosua Ntim-Sekyere, the head of the client service and leader of the delegation, said the ‘see something, say something ‘campaign was launched in 2022 to draw the attention of citizens to report suspicious activities they might have come across to the appropriate security agencies for the necessary actions.

She explained that the four-day sensitization and campaign tour of the Western North Region was part of measures to check on terrorist activiti
es from foreigners in Ghana.

She said the Western North Region was the seventh region the team visited and would continue in the other regions.

According to her, security was a shared responsibility and entreated every citizen to get involved to ensure peace and stability of the country.

‘This is a proactive measure by the government through the Ministry of National Security for prompt action.’

Mrs Ntim-Sekyere urged residents to be Security conscious since five districts in the region shared borders with Ivory Coast.

She lauded the cooperation from residents as far as the ‘see something say something’ campaign was concerned and called on them to ensure the activities of foreigners did not compromise the security of the country.

She said the security number 999 would always be ready to respond to their calls but however, advised against prank calls.

The team was accompanied by the regional security liaison officers.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Araba Benson (pseudonym) tested positive for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in 2004 with her husband and two of her children.

They experienced many opportunistic symptoms including skin rashes, loss of appetite, severe headache, stomach pains, diarrhoea and cough, not knowing what it was initially.

The debilitating symptoms started with her husband who turned very weak and could barely do anything for himself.

His condition deteriorated, leading to the collapse of his business as a fridge repairer which took a heavy toll on his family.

HIV Test

Eventually, he was led by a Catholic Sister to a facility at Agormanya in the Eastern Region where he discovered he had been infected with HIV.

The development prompted his wife and children to run the same test, a test that came out positive.

Araba and her family were advised to go to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital for antiretroviral drugs after two months, but they hesitated, doubting the effectiveness of the medication.

‘I decided not to take the med
ication because we were going to die anyway. But I had a change of mind when I visited Korle Bu with my husband and saw the state of some of the patients who looked like skeletons.

‘Then, I decided to give it a try because I did not want to die in a skeletal state to bring shame to my family,’ she said.

Because there were not adequate medications at the time, priority was given to patients with weaker immune systems.

Treatment

Consequently, Araba’s husband and her nine-year-old son who were in relatively worse conditions were put on drugs immediately, leaving the rest of the family to start treatment later.

‘I was operating a restaurant then, but I couldn’t run it anymore. Life was quite difficult in the beginning because we were all attending hospital for treatment.

‘We could barely feed ourselves. I was using every money I had saved to cook because we were advised not to eat from the street,’ she said.

After religiously taking her medication for a while and reaching an undetectable viral load, Araba
gave birth to her third child who tested negative for the virus.

The entire family is still alive and at 52, Araba looks plump and very healthy.

‘Because we started early medication, nobody knows our status,’ she said.

Statistics

The Ghana AIDS Commission’s 2022 reports indicated that a total of 24,046 people are living with HIV in the Central Region which recorded 1,240 new infections.

Of the number, 16,021 representing 71.63 per cent are women.

It adds that adults,15 years and above are 22,364, representing 93 per cent.

The Gomoa East District recorded the highest incidence with 2,590 cases while Ekumfi recorded the lowest with 285, the report indicated.

The figures position the Central Region as the fourth region with the highest population of persons living with HIV, following the Greater Accra, Ashanti, and Eastern Regions.

Poor ART coverage

Unfortunately, the Central Region is the second region with the lowest Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) coverage of 53.9 per cent, only second to the Savannah
Region which has 53.1 per cent.

This means that more than 46 per cent of the persons living with the virus in the Region are not on ART treatment, posing significant risks to themselves and the larger population.

Mr William Kwaku Yeboah, the Central Regional Technical Coordinator for the Ghana AIDS Commission, attributes the unwillingness of people to seek treatment to continuous stigma and discrimination even though treatment is free.

‘They are tagged as immoral people. In fact, the moment you get HIV, even your own child can stay away from you and so, people are not willing to test in the first place to know their status.

‘Which means, they will keep on infecting more people,’ he noted.

He says it is possible to end AIDS if HIV-positive persons take their medications religiously to make the virus ‘undetectable’ and ‘untransmittable. ‘

Ghana, he observed, has adequate medication, readily available in many health facilities across the country to cater for all patients.

Contraceptives and prevention

Mr
Yeboah debunked the notion that all contraceptives could protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

‘Any contraceptive you use besides a condom cannot protect you against HIV. Condom is the only contraceptive that can protect you from HIV and other STIs. The rest will only prevent pregnancy,’ he cautioned.

For the region to keep recording new cases, means people are not using condoms because sexual transmissions form about 80 per cent of the infections, he said.

While advising against having multiple sexual partners, he said it was important to ‘protect oneself at all times and never lose guard because one does not know the status of the other party.’

Mr Yeboah appealed to the public to make conscious efforts at all levels towards eliminating the virus, citing the burden of the disease on individuals, families, communities, and the State.

‘If HIV were not there, the monies we have spent on it for the past 37 years could have been channelled into other areas of development,’ he said.

Routine testing

Narrating her experience with the virus, Araba entreated the public to get tested to know their status for early treatment if they tested positive, stating that everything about HIV treatment is free.

‘Don’t be nervous about it. It is better to know what is wrong with you before it gets worse and kills you,’ she advised.

She observed that the virus does not kill but a lot of people are dying because they are not taking good care of themselves.

‘There are people who have stopped taking their medications because they feel better now. You are not completely free from the virus. If you stop taking the medication, the virus will come back in their numbers.

‘People are also resorting to churches and all sorts of spiritual places. We are urging all of them to come back to care,’ she said.

Way forward

The economic, social and health effects of HIV and AIDS are devastating.

To end the virus, all stakeholders, particularly the Ghana AIDS Commission and the Ghana Health Service, must return to th
eir intensive campaign against the virus and work to widen the ART coverage across the country.

It is trite knowledge that the Ghana AIDS Commission is woefully under-resourced and faces severe logistical challenges.

The government must resource the Commission adequately to enable them to undertake their duties diligently.

Health is a shared responsibility, thus citizens must endeavour to get tested and start early treatment if they test positive.

Additionally, as Araba has done, more survivors are encouraged to share their success stories with the therapy to encourage more patients to commit to the treatment.

With a concerted effort, Ghana can and must strive to become HIV-free.

Source: Ghana News Agency

A research undertaken by the Northern Patriots in Research and Advocacy (NORPRA) shows that dams constructed under the One Village One Dam (1V1D) initiative have dried up and are not serving their planned purposes.

In view of this, a Coalition of Civil Society Organisations focusing on accelerating socio-economic transformation of Northern Ghana through advocacy for increased public investment, has called on government to consider the failure of the dams as a lesson to guide a review of the initiative for effective implementation to achieve improved livelihoods of citizens, particularly people in the north.

The Coalition made the call at a meeting with officials of the Northern Development Authority (NDA) in Tamale where the research report on the dams under the 1V1D initiative was presented to the officials of the NDA.

The Coalition also called for audit on the 1V1D initiative investigating the procurement processes as well as the full involvement of the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA) in th
e project.

They lauded the potency of the 1V1D initiative in ensuring food security, improved livelihood, and sought its review to achieve objectives of the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP) as well as the Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA).

Mr Bismark Adongo Ayorogo, Executive Director, NORPRA, presenting the report, said the research revealed that dams across the five regions of the north were dug with the one size fit all approach, which was not appropriate.

He said although GIDA was a state institution vested with the mandate of designing irrigation infrastructure in the country, it was left out of the implementation of the 1V1D initiative.

He said, ‘We engaged GIDA and questioned their whereabouts when there is evidence that they constructed dams that supported all-year-farming. GIDA experts said they gave their technical advice but the advice was ignored.’

Mr Ayorogo said during interactions with community members, there were expressions of disappointment as they recalled los
ing huge sums when their farms were cleared for construction of the dams.

The report titled ‘Ghana’s Oil Money on Dried Dams,’ was under the 1V1D Expenditure and Performance Tracking Project funded by the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP).

The report presented at the meeting indicated that, all 10 dams sampled under the 1V1D initiative had a 100 per cent complete status but had dried up.

It compared earth dams constructed by GIDA under the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to dams under the 1V1D initiative, and concluded that the former served the purpose of sustainable agriculture.

Mr Iddi Zakaria, Deputy Chief Executive Officer in-charge of Projects and Programmes at NDA, in response to the report, said the report would be considered to improve operations of the initiative.

He, however, stated that it was bias to make conclusions with a sample size of 10 dams out of existing 560, saying the full delivery of the dams could not be measured with a lower sample size.

He said, ‘Admittedly, not all the
dams are doing very well but visiting 10 dams and making a conclusion could not show which is doing well on not.’

He said the NDA’s role was to manage the construction of the dams and had limited information on issues surrounding them, including selecting contractors, siting and amount involved.

Mr Zakaria said the NDA was open to more engagements on the subject to leverage the findings towards improving the 1V1D initiative.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Drivers plying the Bolgatanga-Bawku Road in the Upper East Region have decried the deplorable state of the road and the poor visibility, especially at dawn or dusk, making vehicular movement very difficult.

The drivers said due to the current volatile nature of the area, anything that affected free and smooth driving could be fatal as criminals sometimes laid ambush at vulnerable spots to attack travellers.

The drivers called on the authorities to make the shoulders of the roads more visible.

Some of the drivers who spoke with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Bolgatanga said there were inadequate road and pavement reflectors to help control movement as well as warning signs to encourage safe driving at night.

The most affected parts are Kongo in the Nabdam District, through to Zebilla in the Bawku West District to the Bawku Municipality, and along the Kobore Bridge on the White Volta.

Mr Adams Yakubu, a salon commercial car driver, who is a regular user of the road, noted that due to the stalled works and
the curfew imposed, the drivers competed to get to their destination within time to avoid security issues.

Road signs were most crucial to alert drivers of dangers along the stretch when trying to beat the curfew hours.

One of the drivers was particularly uncomfortable with traders of watermelon, onions, and other vegetables located on the Bazua Bridge despite police presence, making it difficult for drivers to manuevre.

‘This place is particularly dangerous because in the evenings the reflectors are not bright enough and people sometimes hurriedly run across the road, which can cause accidents,’ the driver said.

Source: Ghana News Agency

The Africa Centre for Human Rights and Sustainable Development (AfCHuRSD), a non-governmental organisation, has provided financial literacy training to women and girls with disability in small scale businesses in the Jirapa Municipality of the Upper West Region to enable them to sustain their trade.

They were also trained in branding and records keeping as well as introduced to financial products they could access from financial institutions to support their business growth.

The intervention was part of the implementation of the Promoting Equal Rights for Women and Girls with Disabilities (PERD) Project, aimed to protect the fundamental human rights of women and girls with disability in and out of school, particularly their rights to employment and protection from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

The project is being implemented by a consortium of women-led organisations – AfCHuRSD, Plan Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG) and Women in Need (WIN), with funding from the Netherlands Embassy in Gha
na.

Speaking at the training in Jirapa, Madam Bernice Naah, the Executive Director, AfCHuRSD, touched on the necessity of the training, which was to help the women to sustain their businesses.

‘Some of you have been in these businesses for long but you are not able to expand because you spend your capital.

So we feel that by giving you this kind of training, you will know how to manage your finances to sustain your businesses,’ she said.

Madam Naah explained that they held similar training programmes in Sanarigu in the Northern Region and Nadowli in the Upper West Region.

She said they would provide start-up capital to the women and girls with disability, who had received the skills training and were interested in starting and managing their own small businesses.

The NGO had also built the confidence levels of the beneficiaries to appreciate their self-worth and engage in any legal economic activity of their choice.

The AfCHuRSD is implementing the project in the Jirapa Municipality, Nadowli-Kaleo Dist
rict, the Wa School for the Blind and School for the Death in the Upper West Region and Sagnarigu in the Northern Region.

The beneficiaries shared their testimonies to motivate those in small businesses but could not expand to take part in activities of the NGO to receive some support.

Ms Margaret Liere, a beneficiary, spoke about the support she received to start a soap-making business from which she was deriving the expected benefits, and commended the NGO for the intervention.

Mr Titus Danaa, the Head of Operations, Sonzele Rural Bank PLC in Jirapa, educated the participants on the various financial products available at the bank for small businesses and how they could take advantage to support their businesses.

He encouraged them to inculcate the habit of savings by opening accounts with the bank as well as to register their businesses, which were requirements for accessing bank loans.

Mr Mohamed Awal Abubakari, the Head of the Business Advisory Centre, Jirapa Municipality, took the participants thro
ugh business records keeping and planning on expenditure, which was necessary for their business growth.

He said they ought to always know their needs and budget accordingly to avoid excess expenditure, which could ruin their businesses.

‘Some people end up spending on unplanned things … for such a person even if you are given the whole world you still can’t achieve anything from it,’ Mr Abubakari observed.

Madam Ayisha Nasiri-deen, Head of the Social Welfare Unit, Jirapa Municipal Assembly, encouraged the participants to take the knowledge and lessons from the training seriously to improve their businesses, which would impact their lives positively.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Smartly dressed school children from 18 Basic and Junior High Schools participated in a colorful parade to mark the Nsuta Zonal Council celebration of Ghana’s Independence Day.

The atmosphere at the Dadwen School Complex Park in the Tarkwa Nsuaem Municipality was very exciting with spectators at various areas waving miniature Ghana flags.

As of 0730 hours, the sun was already set promising to be very hot but, hundreds of people from Nsuta and its environs, especially school children, were already seated while others were standing awaiting the commencement of the parade.

The theme for this year’s celebration was: ‘Our Democracy Our Pride.’

Madam Korkor Addy, Head of Human Capital, Ghana Manganese Company Limited, in a speech read on behalf of the Municipal Chief Executive of Tarkwa Nsuaem, Mr Benjamin Kessie commended the founding fathers, ‘saying without them there would be no Ghana

‘We remember with gratitude the countless freedom fighters and revolutionaries who struggled, strived and made heroic sacri
fices to earn us the enviable status of becoming the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to be free from colonial rule. The newly formed country became a catalyst for independence movements across the continent.’

She assured the residents of Tarkwa Nsuaem that the Assembly would continue to do its best to ensure that teaching and learning conditions were improved across the municipality through the provision of the needed infrastructure.

Madam Addy thanked all teachers for their commitment towards developing the Municipality and encouraged students to take their studies seriously and adequately equip themselves to take advantage of future opportunities.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Here are some beautiful photos from the 67th Independence Day Parade, held at the Youth Resource Centre in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional capital.

Source: Ghana News Agency