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IMANI Ghana boss, Franklin Cudjoe has called on government to shut down its initiatives such as the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) and the Youth Enterprise Support programmes with immediate effect.

He wants government to rather focus on resourcing the various technical and vocational institutions to absorb such potential YEA and YES beneficiaries in a bid to equip them with employable skills for the job market.

Government, as part of efforts to fighting corruption, announced that some companies indicted in the GYEEDA corruption scandal have been blacklisted.

Ghana lost some millions of cedis after the GYEEDA programme, a social intervention targeting the country’s unemployed youth, was marred by some corruption scandals.

But Franklin Cudjoe believes - “it’s not enough to blacklist such companies. That is unfortunately a lazy way out.”

“I think that the best thing to do is to shut down YEA and YES and rather focus on ensuring that the technical and vocational institutions that we’ve set up will be resourced and be asked to help these people. I’ve told the minister directly that it’s better off shutting these entities down,” he added.

He further called on government to create an enabling environment for businesses so they can employ young people, he said during an interview with Accra-based Citi FM.

“As much as possible, they should be interested in ensuring that the right avenues, scenarios and the right environment exist for you and I to be able to create opportunities for people. My challenge is that, the same state usually doesn’t serve us well when it comes to the policy making angle which should deal with some of the people they consider to be poor and for which they need to salvage by creating these schemes.

"..If you have an educational policy which suggests that you don’t respect middle level technical manpower, you don’t respect technical and vocational institutions and you don’t give them the necessary support, then clearly speaking, if those who are not able to make it to the elite schools fall through the cracks, you don’t salvage them by creating other parallel schemes,” he said.