EUNICE AGBENYADZI ADDRESSING THE PARTICIPANTS ON THE PROJECT

Star-Ghana Foundation with funding from the Botnar Foundation has started the implementation of a three-year-project named Action for Youth Development (AfYD) in the New Juaben South Municipality (NJSMA)of the Eastern region.

The project also known as “our city project” with focus on the youth as the primary target would contribute to a municipality where young people would be informed and have the capacity to participate actively in governance and influence improved services across all sectors.

It would also strengthen the capacities of the youth-led/ based organisations, networks and coalition to mobilize, represent and engage constructively with duty bearers to sustainably address their needs and priorities in decisions and resources distribution.

The Head of Programmes at Star-Ghana Foundation, Eunice R. Agbenyadzi made this known at an inception durbar held to provide a larger platform for all relevant stakeholders particularly the youth groups, municipal authorities, traditional leaders, and other actors to deliberate and provide more inputs for the design and implementation of the project.

Ms Agbenyadzi indicated that in 2020, the district league table (DLT 2020) rated the New Juaben Municipality as one of the 10 least performing districts on governance.

“The score indicated a poor performance in the implementation of its action plan for development, and as the action plan is a critical tool for development, its poor implementation impacts on the quality of services,” she added.

For that reason, she stated that Star-Ghana Foundation with funding from Botnar came up with the project to help to whip up the interest of the citizenry, especially the youth to engage themselves in the issues of governance and to press on duty bearers to  engage the citizenry in their activities.

“Overall, this project would contribute to ensuring that young people are not left behind in the development processes and benefits and would promote partnership between duty bearers and citizens to ensure that development programming is more meaningful for young people and delivers health and wellbeing, access to social services, including education, decent work for young people,” she said.

She revealed that the project was approached from an inclusion perspective and would contribute to reducing inequalities within access to social services for different categories of young people and would strengthen an enabling environment for youth inclusion and influence in governance as well as access to quality public goods and services within Koforidua.

“Through this focus, the AfYD makes a direct impact on the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1,2,3,4,5,8,10 and 16,” the Head of Programmes indicated.  

For his part, the Coordinating Director of the NJSMA, Mr Edward Abazing was grateful to Star-Ghana Foundation and Botnar for the project build the capacities of the youth and whip up their interest to participate in their programmes.

He indicated that the assembly as part of its programmes deem it necessary to plan with the youth on their programmes, revealing that unfortunately most of the youth refused to show interest or attend their programmes when they were needed to share their inputs during town hall meeting among others.

He stated that the project would help greatly to bring them on board to contribute their quota in the development of the assembly.

 A representative of Botnar Foundation, Zur Oren said his outfit was working in 12 counties around the world of which Ghana was part and was committed to developing young people.

He stated that the project would succeed based on collaboration and urged Star-Ghana Foundation to take the wheel and gear the project by involving all stakeholders in a manner that would benefit the people of Koforidua. 

From Ama Tekyiwaa Ampadu Agyeman, Koforidua