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The Director of Project Citizen-Ghana, one of the flagship youth programmes under the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Mrs Fanny Kumah, has urged facilitators in participating schools to ensure that the students acquired skills for effective participation in democracy. That would equip the students with the entire disposition needed for participating in the democratic dispensation under the project and not as a platform where they were taught only to be presented at the regional showcases, which is a component of the project. Mrs Kumah said project Citizen Ghana was aimed at training the students to participate in qualitative democracy where they would be able to change attitudes based on the knowledge and insight of constitutional and governance issues. She was speaking at a refresher workshop for 32 teacher-facilitators and eight NCCE staff drawn from the Eastern Region. The workshop was aimed at retraining the facilitators on some of the challenges identified in the implementation of the project. Mrs Kumah said it had been identified that the objective of inculcating the skills for qualitative participatory democracy was not being achieved although the students were able to identify problems and their solutions. She said in correcting that at the earlier stages, similar workshops had been conducted in all the regions for the participating schools to ensure that the right objective of the Project Citizen-Ghana was achieved. Mrs Kumah said as the programme was to imbibe patriotism in the students of today for a better Ghana tomorrow, students in the special schools had not been left out. The School for the Deaf at Mampong Akuapem and Wa and the School for the Blind at Akropong had been selected to take part in the project since last year. The Project Citizen-Ghana was started in 2006 by the NCCE to teach students the constitution, governance, patriotism and citizenship to be able to participate in Ghana's democracy. The Eastern Region has 16 schools including Senior and Junior High schools with 32 facilitators and eight staff members from the NCCE who coordinate the activities of the participating schools. Mr Eric Bortey, the Regional Director of the NCCE, said the project was a well thought-out interdisciplinary civic education activity for the youth aimed at promoting qualitative participation in both local and national governance. He said Ghana's democracy had only been reduced to national elections, which takes place every four years without majority of the people understanding the democratic process let alone to demand accountability from people they had put in place to manage their affairs.