Professor Stephen Adei, Member of Board of Trustees, The BEIGE Foundation
The BEIGE Foundation has launched a youth empowerment programme dubbed Youth Excellence League (YEL) to train, support and promote youth excellence in the country.
The initiative, powered by BEIGE Group, seeks to recognise and award exceptional youth talent, particularly in the area of academia including basic, secondary and tertiary levels of education.
YEL has a seed capital of GH?1million and would receive yearly funding to support and promote excellence among the country’s youth.
According to Anne-Marie Blackmore, Programmes Officer of the BEIGE [ads1]Foundation, the Youth Excellence League will bring together the best youthful brains in the country.
“Through this project, we seek not to only identify and support these talents but to push our youth to crave for excellence in all they do. We believe that the youth form a significant part of the nation; hence the need to give them a push that will eventually inure to the benefit of the country in the right direction
“It is our belief also that persons that perform remarkably in the academics or whose overall achievements are outstanding are worthy of celebration. It is for this reason that the project is designed to reward their excellence,” she said.
Beneficiaries, apart from receiving financial rewards, will be trained and honed as part of a skills development programme run by The BEIGE Academy, the capacity and skills training arm of the BEIGE Group.
As a project, the Youth Excellence League would actively search for, identify and support youth who demonstrate exceptional skills in their academic programmes. These would include youth at the Junior High levels, Senior High Levels and the tertiary institutions.
According to the BEIGE Group which has subsidiaries in savings and loans, real estate and insurance, the Foundation’s ideals are youth development, modifying behaviour and nurturing a new breed of young talent by bringing youth together to promote a culture that would lead them into becoming advocates for excellence.
Speaking at the launch of the initiative, Prof. Audrey Gadzekpo, Dean of the School of Communications Studies at the University of Ghana, who chaired the event, reiterated the need for corporate institutions to intervene in the future of Ghana’s youth.
“Our country have a crisis in youth employment and it is important that corporate bodies like the BEIGE Group contribute to making sure that the young ones have a brighter future. The YEL is a good starting point and I have no doubt that it will help in shaping the future of this country,” Prof. Gadzekpo said.
The event was also used to induct the first five members of the YEL who received various cash prizes. According to the BEIGE Foundation, about 30 more members are expected to be enrolled into the programme before the end of the year.