The Mfantseman Municipal Assembly has rolled out a comprehensive sponsorship scheme aimed at training youths in the area in order to raise a human resource in accountancy and administration.
The scheme, according to the Assembly, is part of its responsibilities stipulated in Section 12 of the Local Government Act, particularly relating to academic sponsorship, and is intended to target a hundred students each year, thus “training four hundred students in the next four years”.
The package was launched on Monday at the Mfantsiman Girls’ Senior High School, Saltpond, the Municipal capital, and was attended by Senior High School and Polytechnic graduates as well as current students from all the four public Senior High Schools in the Municipality.
Explaining the rationale of the scheme to Citi News, the Municipal Chief Executive, Kenneth Kelly Essuman, indicated the collaboration between the Assembly and the Mfantseman Education Directorate, the sponsorship is “to equip the youths in the Municipality with skills so that they will become useful to themselves, to their families, to Mfantseman and to Ghana as a whole”.
Other stakeholders in the scheme are the Students Loan Trust Fund, the Institute of Accountancy Training (IAT) and the Institute of Chartered Accountancy Ghana (ICA), with the two institutions serving as the training agencies.
The Assembly, besides its financial package, will also create a satellite campus in the Municipality for the two institutions for academic work to begin in the 2017/2018 academic year.
Hon Essuman noted it is a mandate of the Assembly to “sponsor the education of the youth in the Municipality, so the Mfantseman Assembly will, from its internally generated funds, support these children to go through their studies”.
He explained, “The IAT does a two-year diploma programme and because it is under the Ministry of Finance, the tuition has been taken over by the Government of Ghana, so the student’s contribution is three hundred Ghana Cedis per semester and there two semesters in a year”.
“This means that for four semesters somebody needs only GHC 1,200 to come out with a diploma, and I don’t think this is difficult for the Assembly to do”, Hon Essuman added.
On whether the package is not biased towards students with Business background only, the MCE noted every student can take advantage of the scheme no matter their academic background.
He, however, admitted that “those who did Business programmes will be slightly ahead of those who did the General Arts, Visual Art, Home Economics and are now shifting into the Business arena”.
A participant, an SHS graduate from Kormantse, a community in the Municipality, expressed his disappointment in why the sponsorship scheme does not include packages for students in the Municipality who want to pursue Science programmes at the tertiary level.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
