Mr Ignatius Baffuor Awuah, the Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, has urged metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies (MMDAs) to mainstream the National Green Jobs Strategy into budgeting and planning to boost local economies.
By doing so, they must institute stringent measures to harmonise ongoing green interventions through effective multi-sectoral approach and coordination by all state and non-state actors.
Green jobs are jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services beneficial to the environment or which conserve natural resources.
The National Green Jobs Strategy focuses on enhancing coordination of interventions impacting green jobs across sectors, promoting development, supporting green enterprises to grow and expand, while facilitating the accessibility to green financial resources.
Its overall objective is to ensure policy alignment and coordination for green skills’ development, support the creation of green enterprises, mobilise funds to support green businesses and sustain awareness creation.
Mr Baffuor Awuah said it was incumbent on MMDAs to tap into opportunities in the global transition from brown to green economies to create decent jobs for the teeming unemployed youth.
He said this on Monday in a speech read on his behalf at a sensitisation and awareness creation workshop on the National Green Jobs Strategy (2021-2025) for planners and budget officers in the Central Region.
It was sponsored by the Netherlands Development Organisation, SNV, under its European Union-funded GrEEn Project, together with the Ministry.
“At the district and local levels, where the action is, we can begin green job creation interventions, support green skills and green enterprise development activities through the usual annual budget programmes and activities.”
“It must be deliberate efforts to mobilise funds to support green enterprises as part of our usual local enterprise support activities,” he noted.
“I believe if we can do these things in our ways, we stand a good chance of promoting the emerging green economy, contributing immensely to curbing the effects of climate change and maximising job creation impact of Ghana’s sustainable development policies and measures.”
Policymakers, government functionaries and individual citizens, he said, must become aware of the happenings of climate change and the associated policies and measures.
“This will mitigate the dire implications of some of the choices that were made, particularly regarding the environment and the labour market.”
Mr Baffuor Awuah warned that the negative impacts of global warming and climate change had resulted in floods, heat waves, changes in the weather patterns, drought, heavy rains, eroding soil fertility, seasonal shifts among others.
Mr Gideon Mankralo, the National Project Officer for the Just Transition Project of the International Labour Organisation, said the Green Transition seeks to ensure that the substantial benefits of a green economy transition were widely shared.
At its core, he said the just transition was a forward-looking, action-oriented framework that identifies opportunities for public and private investment in economic development, which were both sustainable and inclusive.
It also supports those who stand to lose economically – be they countries, regions, industries, communities, workers, or consumers.
Mr Ebenezer Matey, Business Development and Business Market Linkages Advisor, said skills development was one of the key tools the organisation had adopted to facilitate growth under its GrEEn Project with MMDAs in the Ashanti and Western regions.
Source: GNA