OIC LAUNCHES DEV FUND FOR CAMPUS OF EXCELLENCE ( Page 28)

21/10/2008
Story: Mary Mensah
The Opportunities Industrialisation Centre (OIC) in the country has launched a $10 million development fund for the construction of the ‘OIC Campus of Excellence" at East Legon.
The campus will offer vocational and technical skills training for the youth.
In an address read on his behalf, the President, Mr John Agyekum Kufour, said since it started work in the country some 38 years ago OIC had trained over 20,000 youth in vocational and technical skills throughout the country.
He said OIC’s rural development programme which was aimed at increasing food security, improving agricultural production, access to potable water, fostering entrepreneurship and business development as well as providing humanitarian assistance among others had also benefited hundreds of thousands of the poor and disadvantaged.
The President said the current global food, energy and water crisis had created enormous workforce needs, training and capacity building as well as job creation programmes for the youth.
President Kufour said the unique OIC self-help approach to skills training focused on the individual and provided motivational and vocational counselling to develop a positive attitude to work and self discipline and attributed its success to its focus on the practical and theoretical as well as on the job training before certification.
He said OIC’s corporate social responsibility programmes and its partnerships with the largest gold mining companies in Ghana like Newmont, Goldfields and AngloGold Ashanti had also helped to create wealth and enhance economic opportunities for the rural population in mining areas.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Mines Ms Joyce Aryee, said in order for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes to work, the government and the private sector must forge a new understanding of the balance of public/private responsibility and develop new governance and business models for creating social values.
She said it was obvious that when CSRs were carried out effectively they added up to the development of the human capital by way of training and education, provision of potable drinking water, building of infrastructure and the creation of industrial harmony for business to thrive.
She indicated that the chamber in 2007 spent $1 million on education, $565,000 on health, $2.8 million on alternative livelihood projects, $220 on water provision and $262, 000 on sanitation amongst others.
Earlier in a welcoming address, the OIC Regional Director, Ms Carla Dominique Denizard, said the OIC movement started in the US in 1969 in an abandoned jail house in Philadelphia and started on the African continent with Ghana, 38 years ago with corporate and donor support.
She said the late Founder of the OIC, Rev Leon H. Sullivan was a renowned African-American Civil Rights leader who contributed to the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa.
Ms Denizard expressed her appreciation to corporate organisations who had assisted the OIC over the years and called on others to join in to enable the OIC extend its work to all the 10 regions.
She said currently OIC was in eight regions and expressed the hope to extend its operations to the remaining regions.