Gov’t to soon launch “YouStart” to help young businesses. Finance Minister
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta has announced that, government will soon launch another initiative to help young people start and grow small businesses in the country.
According to him the initiative dubbed “YouStart” is looking to create 1 million jobs with a seed capital of GHC 1billion and would take effect from March 2022.
Finance minister mentioned this while presenting the 2022 budget on the floor of Parliament on Wednesday 17th November, 2021.
He said the initiative would be a vehicle for supporting young entrepreneurs to gain access to capital, training, technical skills, and mentoring to enable them to launch and operate their own businesses.
“The initiative aims to support the youth to develop commercially viable businesses. To this end, YouStart is designed to instill proper commercial orientation in the beneficiaries. This will include financial institutions determining the credit metrics and GEA and NEIP providing training support especially for the standardized SME loans”.
He said the “YouStart” will support youth-led enterprises with soft loans of up to GH¢50,000 to help start-ups particularly by young graduates and school leavers and small businesses to expand their businesses.
The finance minister also indicated that “Starter packs, Soft loans tied to equipment acquisition of up to GH¢50,000 for individuals while GH¢100,000 for associations and groups; he said standardized loan package of between GH¢100,000 to GH¢400,000 at concessional rates for SMEs from financial institutions”.
He said government is also engaging financial institutions and development partners to support the job creation drive for the youth.
“All these interventions will create a robust financing eco-system capable of supporting businesses from the early to mature stage”.
Story by: Yakubu Alhassan | www.diamondfmonline.com
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