A business beginners’ summit has been held in Sunyani with a call on the youth to develop interest with confidence in creating their own businesses for self-employment.
The one-day meeting dubbed ‘Sunyani Start-Up Summit 2021’ on the theme “Digital Media for Business and Jobs Creation in this Era” was to inspire innovation and creativity to build participants’ capacity to turn simple ideas to big business ventures.
It was organized on Friday by the GrassRoots Hub in partnership with Ghana Tech Lab as part of the digital media training, supported by the Ministry of Communication, Master Card Foundation and the World Bank under the Pathways to Sustainable Employment (PaSE) Programme.
The event brought together more than 100 participants made up of entrepreneurs, investors, students, lecturers, unemployed and representatives of private sector businesses to share ideas and promote interest in start-up culture and increase access to funding for young businesses within Sunyani and its environs.
The summit was also an internship and incubation period for participants of a six weeks digital media training recently held in Sunyani for participants who represented different youth groups in the Bono Region.
Trainees in Videography, Digital Marketing, Sound Design, Graphic and Motion Design, Creative Writing and Blogging as well as Photography were equipped to be able to use social media as a creative way in contributing to the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Three youth groups ‘Tell Us Media’, ‘Izy Kach’ and ‘Plan Me’ competed with presentations to the audience their innovative ideas and the winner, ‘Tell Us Media’ would go through capacity building training to represent Sunyani in an impending national competition in Accra.
Earlier in an opening remark, Mr Emmanuel Marfo, Co-Founder and President of GrassRoots Hub, a local youth-based non-governmental organisation that facilitates youth digital training for self-employment opportunities, emphasised the summit was to create an excellent environment opportunity for beginners in business to network and identify mentors.
This, he added would strengthen their capacities as graduates with potentials to create jobs for themselves and employ others to reduce, if not total prevention of the rate of over-dependency on government for employment.
Later in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Edmond Amissah, a lecturer at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, encouraged Ghanaian youth to take advantage of digitization to generate innovative ideas to create jobs for themselves and others.
He said one must have the confidence to start his/her own business, citing that “Toyota, an indigenous Japanese company that manufactures Toyota cars is a family business that started in a small way, but it’s grown to become a global brand and no member of that family would ever be going round looking for employment”.
