YouStart Ghana Initiative Programme

Explore the transition of Nation Builders Corps (NABCo) now known as YouStart Ghana Initiative Programme. As part of efforts to address the high youth unemployment rate in Ghana, Government announced an ambitious entrepreneurial programme in the 2022 budget known as YouStart.

Table of Contents

What is YouStart

YouStart is a vehicle through which Government intends to provide funding and technical support to youth and youth-led businesses that fall within this category to assist them to start, build and grow their businesses.

What’s the Purpose of the YouStart Initiative Programme

The purpose of YouStart is to build an entrepreneurial nation that will create at least 1 million jobs for the youth in the next 3 years (2022 – 2025).

About YouStart Ghana Initiative Programme

YouStart is a programme that seeks to support young entrepreneurs to gain access to capital, access to market, training and technical skills, compliance and quality assurance support and business development support services that will enable them to start, build and grow their businesses.

This programme targets young people between the ages of 18- 40 years who have brilliant business ideas and viable businesses. You Start seeks to support these individuals to nurture, grow and expand their businesses and create jobs in the economy.

The government through the YouStart programme intends to build an entrepreneurial nation by providing some of the key enablers that make entrepreneurship a success. These include;

Training and capacity building
Access to finance
Access to market, technology and procurement opportunities
Business development support services
Compliance and quality assurance support services

The programme is benchmarked against similar successful models in the world including the Small Business Administration (SBA) in the US and the British Business Bank, UK.

Through this programme, Government intends to commit about GHS10 billion over the next 3 years towards the creation of at least a million jobs in the economy. This will be achieved using part of the proceeds from the Electronic Transaction Levy (e-Levy) and other funding sources as such the World Bank, IFC, MasterCard, select PFIs and other DFIs.

The You Start Ghana initiative programme forms part of the GHS100 billion Ghana Cares “ObaatanPa” programme which was launched by the Government of Ghana (GOV) to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, return the country to a sustained path of robust growth and create a stronger, more resilient and transformed economy.

This document proposes strategies for the implementation of the YouStart programme, the funding model and the operational framework for the programme.