- ….business owners advised
The CEO of Crystal Lake and JCS Investment Limited, Ms. Patricia Safo, has urged business owners to consider employing persons with disability for increased productivity and efficiency.
According to her, persons with disability when given the relevant training and orientation work more satisfactorily compared to persons with full abilities, which she believes will go a long way to boost productivity when they are well trained.
Ms. Safo is of the view that making such potentially valuable Ghanaians economically relevant and viable takes out the challenge of them becoming a burden on their parents and on the economy.
She has therefore emphasised the need for corporate Ghana to look at this assertion carefully and try it, particularly in the area of agribusiness. “The challenge may be for business owners to learn sign-language to be able to communicate with them; but once you are able to get over that hurdle, they are very productive group of people,” she stressed
Ms. Safo is also calling for a review of recruitment policies after government research showed employers’ attitudes are a barrier to disabled people, and said it is time to break the myth about the complexities of employing disabled people.
The CEO of Crystal Lake and JCS Investment Limited made this strong proposition during an Agribusiness Award instituted by the Safo Family in collaboration with the Demonstration School for the Deaf at Mampong-Akuapem in the Eastern Region.
This novel award was to mark the one-year anniversary and as part of activities to observe the death of their beloved late father, Daniel Yaw Osei Safo – the Chairman and Managing Director of Combined Farmers Limited who passed away a year ago.
The Late Daniel Osei Safo was the first Ghanaian farmer to employ persons with disability on his farm, and so the family thought it prudent to institute an agricultural award in his honour on the one-year anniversary of his death.
The Safo family has noticed over the years that employing people from this community was actually not a disadvantage as long as one could train them: “they can actually increase productivity within an organisation. If you give these people the right set of skills, they are definitely able to add positively to the organisation’s output,” she added.
Ms. Patricia Safo, one of the late Daniel Safo’s daughters, stated that the occasion could not have been a more memorable one; the reason being the one-year passing of Mr. D.O. Safo, who started working with people in this community. He loved them, and he had the foresight to include them in his workforce when most people did not understand.
They actually contributed to the growth of his pineapple-business, so they learned to grow pineapple very well and they did a good job. With the example created by D. O. Safo, other organisations like Blue Skies also followed suit.
They are a group of people that business owners, particularly farmers, have to try and work closely with to promote agribusiness.
The Safo family was at the Demonstration School for the Deaf at Mampong-Akuapem in the Eastern Region to mark the first anniversary of Mr. D.O. Safo’s passing, and in the process they also inaugurated some prizes and gave some awards to well-deserving students.
