GNA – Quality research is required for national planning processes and addressing unemployment to facilitate accelerated economic growth and national development, Ms Diana Kwaaba, the Sunyani Hub Manager of the GrassRoots Hub, a non-profit organization, has said.
GrassRoots Hub is a Sunyani-based digital media platform that searches and creates employment opportunities for the youth in the country.
Ms Kwaaba expressed concern about rising youth unemployment in the country, which she noted did not only threaten national security, but remained a major setback to economic growth and national progress.
Speaking at a stakeholder’s engagement meeting held in Sunyani, she said the use of digitization for quality research had huge potential to uncover and offer job opportunities for the youth.
She said the nation required realistic policy guidelines to address her unemployment situation and make life better for young people.
The GrassRoots Hub in partnership with the Gana Tech Lab, with support from the MasterCard Foundation, World Bank and the Ministry of Communication and Digitization, organized the engagement on the theme “the role of mobile app technology development in transforming the local economy for job creation and economic growth”.
It sought to gather consensus on the role of mobile app technology as a pivotal tool in the improvement of the local digital economy and the possibilities of the app to create employment opportunities for the youth.
The engagement was to deliver policy documents that would feed into the development of a well-structured and informed curriculum and ultimately, push a road map for achieving a local digital economic acceleration in transforming.
Participants, including university lecturers, were drawn from the human capital sector, support groups, as well as policy makers and implementers, as regulatory bodies.
Ms Kwaaba called for a national discourse to help identify employable skill gaps, challenges and opportunities, and strategies that would help transform the local economy to spur rapid economic growth and development.
“We are seeking to achieve sustainable development through digital skills and entrepreneurship which forms the greater part of our organization’s mission and vision’’, she said.
Mr Emmanuel Marfo, the Co-founder of GrassRoots Hub noted the effective use of mobile apps could contribute greatly to boosting the local economy, and advised young people to use social media platforms to fetch for jobs.
Most of the participants mentioned network instability and poor internet connectivity as some major challenges confronting the mobile app industry in the Bono Region which needed to be resolved, while others also regretted on the increasing cybercrime in the industry.
GNA