Female graduates undergo training

Article: Salome Donkor
The story of Florence Adjokatcher, a young female graduate of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), who took to frying yam, while schooling at the GIJ, is quite intriguing.
While schooling at the GIJ, Florence combined her education with frying yams opposite her school, to offer her colleague students, something to bite while on break.
With focus, perseverance and a sense of direction, Florence undertook the business, which did not only make her fulfil her desire to pursue her own ideas, but she also received financial reward for the service being rendered.
The young entrepreneur shared her experience with a group of 20 participants who attended a two-day workshop to equip them with entrepreneurial skills. The workshop, dubbed “Women on the Move”, was organised with support from Vital Voices Global Partnership of the United States of America (USA).
The participants were made up of unemployed graduates who hold Higher National Diploma (HND) from various tertiary institutions.
The programme was the initiative of Ms Hillary Gbedemah, a former legal awareness officer of the Volta Regional Office of the Women in Law and Development (WiLDAF), Ghana.
Taking the participants through ‘introduction to entreprenuership’, a lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Captain Sam Addae (retd), said entreprenuership is a world-wide phenomenon and is the driving force behind small businesses.
He said while an inventor creates something new, an entrepreneur puts the resources together for the invention and sets up a viable business.
Capt Addae (retd) said entrepreneurs are creative, put useful ideas into practice and are willing to take risks, which he described as “calculated risk”.
He also spoke about the three reasons why people want to become entrepreneurs and mentioned the desire to be their own bosses, pursue their own ideas and financial rewards which, he said, come as a result of services being rendered.
He said entrepreneurs have a responsibility not to themselves but to the society and mentioned passion for business, product customer focus, tenacity despite failure and execution intelligence as the four steps for successful entrepreneur.
Ms Gbedemah said she undertook the programme as a result of her resolve to work in pursuit of promoting gender mainstreaming, which requires total commitment and adherence to policies and programmes that will promote investing in policies and programmes to empower women and promote gender equality.
She said the programme was designed to help unemployed young women aged between 22 and 30 to identify their potential and obstacles to achieving their goals.
Ms Gbedemah, who presently works with the Law Institute, said she had been involved in issues related to women’s rights for many years and had found out that a lot of women were in a ‘tight corner’ because of lack of empowerment.
“I observed that a number of unemployed women only needed to be assisted to develop business plans and ideas to go into small-scale businesses,” she said, adding that “these women want jobs but they lack the ability to do the small things they can do as entrepreneurs”.
She said the training programme was an opportunity for participants to learn how to draw business plans that were feasible and types of businesses that were viable, and acquire start-up capital, as well as get enlightened on the advantages of record keeping.
The participants were also taken through the legal framework of business, business arrangements and registration, purchasing and registration of property, sample tenancy agreements, basic finance and developing business plans.