NaBCo: GHC700 stipend better than idling at home – UG professor

It is better for Ghanaian graduates to be enrolled onto the Nation Builders Corp (NaBCo) programme and be paid GHS700 as monthly stipend than for them to stay at home jobless, Ansah Tawiah, a professor at the University of Ghana (UG), has said.

He said although the amount is meagre, the initiative will afford the teeming unemployed graduate youth the opportunity to uiltilise the skills they acquired while in school.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Tuesday, 17 October 2018 said he was confident of the success of the NaBCo progamme, which, to him, will sow the seeds for Ghana’s future growth and progress.

President Akufo-Addo made this known when he declared the one hundred thousand young men and women recruited under NaBCo ready for work, at an event at the Black Star Square, Accra.

Describing the day as “a very happy day for me”, the president indicated that the NaBCo programme represents the beginning of “the process of banishing the spectre of desperation, and restoring hope and dignity to our youth.”

Commending the 100,000 NaBCo trainees for not listening to the loud cries of the cynics and ‘Jeremiahs’ who cast aspersions on the programme, he indicated that the trainees “are going to assist in the realisation of the government’s vision of an educated population, an industrialised, robust and well-managed economy, the delivery of good governance, and, for the sustenance of all these, a reliable, skilled and efficient workforce.”

Additionally, the NaBCo trainees, President Akufo-Addo said, will be engaged in a structured work and learning programme environment, where, for every four weeks of work, one week will be dedicated to acquiring soft, future employability, and work readiness skills.

Speaking in an interview with Accra News’ Naa Atswei Oduro on Thursday, 18 October, Prof Ansah said: “The GHS700 is better than staying at home. Although inadequate, it is something they can start life with.”

“In the meantime”, he said, “with the NaBCo initiative, the people will be utilising the skills they acquired in school.”

He further asked the government to establish more factories in order to sustain programmes of this nature.

“As a way to sustain it, let us build more factories as part of the One district-One factory programme where the youth can get work to do,” he said.