Capacity-building workshop held for northern youth-led NGOs

An international nongovernmental organisation into child’s right and girl’s empowerment, Plan International Ghana, has reiterated the need to empower youth groups to enable them to reach out to more of their colleagues for job creation and national development.

It believes that the youth-led organisations understand the issues of their members and would be able to best address them.

However, it said some of them lacked the capacity to attract the needed support to implement programmes to assist their communities.

Capacity building

Consequently, the organisation has organised a five-day capacity-building workshop for selected youth-led organisations from the districts where the organisation is currently operating in the northern part of the country, mainly from the Northern, North East and the Upper West regions in Wa.

The workshop trained the participants in proposal writing, financial management and human capacity development.

The Programme Influencer and Impact Area Manager of Plan International Ghana, Sulemana Hor Gbana, said the objective of the training was to build the capacity of the youth groups that the organisation worked with, to ensure that “they implement our programme that targets the youth.

“We believe that when we build the capacity of the youth today, they would be able to improve their organisation and have the opportunity to be able to reach out to more funding agencies and mobilise resources and go to the communities to improve their lot,” he said.

The goal, he said, was to ensure that the youth had the capacity to lead the process to assist Plan International to achieve its global strategy.

Benefits

Mr Gbana said the capacity building would not only help Plan International in its programme implementation, but would also assist the youth-led organisations to contribute to their own development.

“We believe they have the energy, capacity and knowledge and are innovative enough to be able to drive whatever they want in their own communities,” he said.

He said Plan International pays more attention to girls because even though children as a whole are part of the excluded and vulnerable, “if you look at the girls, they are more vulnerable.

They stand at a disadvantage so far as their development is concerned.

“So, as a global organisation, we believe that though we implement programmes to improve the general well-being of children, we intentionally target girls to ensure we are able to amplify the challenges that face them,” he stated.

Beneficiary

A participant from Tamale, Fadila Fuseini, who is the Founder of Tiyumba Hope Foundation, described the training as an eye opener that would change the way they did things, particularly in how to engage people and in programme implementation.

She said the training would greatly help them to improve on their activities and reach a wider audience with their activities.

She urged the organisation to also organise such workshops to build the capacity of local NGOs as it would assist them in their activities.