Over 692,000 young people in the country are set to benefit from the COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Programme (CoRe) which has been launched by the Springboard Road Show in partnership with the MasterCard Foundation and Solidaridad.
The programme, which seeks to support young people in the country in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, is designed to provide this support through e-mentoring, e-counselling and e-coaching to equip them with relevant skills.
This is to enable them to survive and thrive during and after the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The participants are expected to be drawn from both the formal and informal sectors.
The CoRe programme, which will run from June to November, 2020, will provide support to the beneficiaries in areas such as; building resilience; health awareness; wellness and safety; building relevant workplace skills and job readiness in a post-pandemic era.
It will involve weekly radio and online mentoring sessions in English and various Ghanaian languages as well as counseling for the beneficiaries.
At the virtual launch of the programme, Executive Director of the Springboard Road Show, Mrs Comfort Ocran, said the programme was an extension of the work the Springboard Road Show Foundation had been doing with young people through the Springboard Road Show and the Virtual University in the past fourteen years. She said the COVID-19 pandemic had made it imperative to have an intervention of this nature.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is probably the biggest disruption to our way of life in living history,” she stated.
She said the negative impact of the pandemic cut across social, cultural, psychological, economic, financial and every other aspect of human life, hence the need to introduce such a programme to support the young ones.
Stepping up
The Regional Director, West, Central and Northern Africa for MasterCard Foundation, Ms Nathalie Akon Gabala, said the MasterCard Foundation had been working on the continent for over a decade to increase access to education and financial services and in the wake of COVID-19, it was clear that it needed to step up its game on the continent to address the pandemic.
“Our aim is to create dignified work for young people and we have an objective of creating 30 million jobs for young women and young Africans over the next ten years,” she stated.
The Acting Country Director of Solidaridad, Mr Bossman Owusu, on his part, said the programme sought to provide counselling for young people to be able to cope with the stress and anxiety that had been brought by COVID-19.
“It gets to that point where we need to provide that counselling to help them to be able to cope with the stress and anxiety that has been brought by COVID-19. The CoRE programme, therefore, has the back of all young people who have put in very great efforts to support agriculture,” he explained.
