Youth Camps
The Oheneba International Youth Center will organize yearly youth camps modeled after traditional Scouts Camps. The camp would run for duration of 6 weeks and would be available to youth all around the country and internationally. The camp is designed to be fun, educating and inspiring to its participants.
Activities during the camping period include
- Outdoor Recreational and sporting activities for health and wellness e.g hiking, kayaking, water sports.
- Team building activities. Traditional schools train the students to compete against each other; each wanting to score a higher grade. In contrast to this, the team building activities are designed to teach the youth the importance and effectiveness of collaboration. Participants will be tasked to work together in teams to solve a problem.
- Skill Acquisition. Campers will have the opportunity to acquire a variety of new skills that could create opportunities for them.
- Leadership and entrepreneurial development activities.
- Merit Badges. Leaders who fulfill several requirements and participants who perform exceptionally in certain activities would be recognized with merit badges.
The Asantehene International Youth Awards
The Asantehene International Youth Awards will be a yearly organized program aimed at providing participants (14-35 year olds) skills and experiences that are consistently recognized by employers and educational institutions worldwide. It will equip young people for life regardless of their background, culture, physical ability, skills and interests. Doing the Award is a personal challenge and not a competition against others; it pushes young people to their personal limits and recognizes their achievements.
The Award is comprised of three levels and four sections. Participants complete all four sections at each level in order to achieve their Award. At Gold level, participants also complete a Residential Project.
- Bronze: For those between 14-17yrs years old.
- Silver: For those between 18-21 years old.
- Gold: For those between 22-35 years old.
Voluntary Service
The Service section of the Award encourages young people to volunteer their time to and understand the benefits of this service to their community. It is aimed at community development.
Skills
The Skills section of the Award encourages the development of personal interests and practical and social skills. Leadership and entrepreneurial skills will also be taught and harnessed in this section.
Physical Recreation
The Physical Recreation section of the Award encourages young people to participate in sport and other physical recreation for the improvement of health and fitness.
Adventurous Journey
The Adventurous Journey section encourages a sense of adventure whilst undertaking a team journey or expedition. As part of a small team, participants will plan, train for and undertake a journey with a defined purpose in an unfamiliar environment.
Gold Residential Project
The Gold Residential Project, completed only at Gold level, aims to broaden participants’ horizons through involvement with others in a residential setting.
Community Development Projects
The Oheneba International Youth Center would periodically organize a combination of youth leadership, community service and community development projects learning programs that are combined in order to develop leadership, communication, planning and writing skills that youth put into practice to identify and solve community problems. The goal of these projects is to get more youth interested in the state of their communities and to challenge them into discovering solutions to prevalent issues.
Environment Projects
In collaboration with the Ghana Forestry Commission, the foundation is embarking on environmental projects aimed at increasing afforestation and reforestation in degraded forest areas, improving participatory forest management, improving climate resilience and biomass production, while simultaneously enhancing incomes and livelihood options and establishing improved forestry planning and monitoring systems.
Our environment projects will be focused on conservational afforestation and reforestation which is done in the best interest of the ecosystem. Its purpose is to restore an area that has been destroyed due to previous overuse of the land or to reduce the amount of erosion in the soil in an area and establish a more fertile soil base. Planting forests upon barren land proffers hope in mitigating the negative effects of climate change through carbon sequestration (where green house gases such as carbon dioxide are absorbed by flora, leading to climate change mitigation), biodiversity loss, and natural resource depletion and this is what we aim to achieve.
The projects are also setup for the purpose of generating carbon credits as in recent years, considerable improvements have been made with forestry projects with respect to accounting of carbon sequestration in forests, resulting in a more solid basis for carbon credit trading.
Youth Entrepreneurship Projects
Youth unemployment is one of our nation’s major challenges and also a big global challenge today. The World Bank estimates we need 600 million new jobs in the next 10 years just to keep global employment rates constant and according to the International Labor Organization, 73.3 million of the world’s unemployed are young people (about 36%). Add ‘under-employed’ youth to this and the number triples; over 169 million young people earn less than US$2 per day.
Through our youth entrepreneurship projects, we will be helping our participants to take their ideas, hobbies and passions and turn them into businesses. The project offers innovative solutions for sustainable livelihood among the youth and therefore economic growth. The project would consist of the following sub-programs:
Training Programs
Here participants will be trained in entrepreneurial skills, management skills, leadership skills and personal development. In developing economies, it is common to find many young people turn to entrepreneurship because of lacking job opportunities. However, not many of them have the necessary skills to see to the success of the business venture embarked on; thus training and development programs are of utmost importance.
Mentorship programs
Mentors can help young people to examine their business plans and ideas. They connect them to larger networks, act as role models and demonstrate models of success. During these programs also, participants will set clearly defined goals which they would work together with their mentors in achieving.
Capitalization
For young entrepreneurs, obtaining access to capital is essential to establish or expand businesses but unfortunately this is where many young entrepreneurs hit a road block. Many entrepreneurship programs only focus on capacity building and development but we are taking it further by providing access to financing for their businesses.
