Helga Boadi of YES!
About a month ago, I heard a very confident, self-assured woman being interviewed on an Accra radio station on the work of the outfit she heads, YES, that is the acronym for the Youth Enterprise Support, a government-sponsored social intervention programme designed to assist our youth to enter and stay in business. I wanted to meet this woman and find out what made her tick, and the basis of the satisfaction she gains from helping others to make money and eke out a living with government assistance.
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So, to satisfy my aroused curiousity, I met Madam Helga Boadi earlier this week. She is clearly a role model not only for women of all ages, but for all in society seeking a beacon to navigate their lives by. An extremely confident, but not brash, highly-educated product of three leading educational institutions in this country, with plenty of experience in the corporate world of Ghana. She had her secondary education in the best girls’ school in this country, Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast, and took a degree each from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi and University of Ghana, Legon in Accra. It would not be an exaggeration to assert that there is a 50 per cent chance that an accomplished woman in this republic attended that school. An example is the esteemed Chief Justice, Her Ladyship Mrs. Georgina Woode.
Employment history
She has worked at Spacefon, now MTN, and she did a stint as boss of corporate affairs at the First Atlantic Bank as well as heading a local branch of an IT firm before ending up at YES eventually as the overall boss. Her choice as the YES boss to succeed Mr Kojo Adu-Asare, ex-Adenta MP, and presidential staffer, months after the formation of the institution, speaks volumes about the faith of her current bosses in her competence and abilities.
Of course, she came to my immediate attention when she led the first 107 recipients of YES assistance to the President for recognition a month ago, an event which got suitable coverage in the media, an upshot of which was the radio interview which drew my attention to her. There were people with physical disabilities among the successful applicants.
About YES
What is YES? As they say in their flyer: ‘’From Ideas to Reality: GH¢10 million fund to turn your idea into a business success’’. This captures the innovations in business promotion, and employment generation, that YES has brought into the vexed issue of youth employment and employment generation in this country. It is actually directly under the Office of the President.
Again, it was the idea of the President to initiate a programme to assist young Ghanaians with the creative business ideas and plans to achieve their full potential. To quote him; “While YES is not a full answer to our job-creation issues, it does reflect my commitment to the future of the Ghanaian youth.
I encourage our young people to begin the process of organising and formalising their business ideas to access the facilities available under the YES.’’
It is not solely about money or credit injection to realise one’s ideas, as YES does offer a multi-sectoral and varied and targeted approach to assist new businesses emanating from the youth. The ceiling age for the youth is 35 years. Madam Boadi assured me that quite a few successful applicants had turned around their businesses into successful ventures from expert technical advice and the support YES offered rather than the initial credit extension services they were expecting. This is achieved through a rigorous merit-based, not quota-based, approach to handling applicants, making the YES programme stand out as sustainable and not a drain on public funds. As I write, the highest sum one can access is GHc50, 000, and even this is never paid as a lump sum to the successful applicant, but paid as a structured payment regime in which the applicant gets YES to offer advice and direction to realise business objectives as well as make money for the new enterprise.
YES offers services following the business cycle of new enterprises, Resident Business Support, Training Resources and Entrepreneurship Mentoring. The idea is that by the time one finishes with the help of YES in these critical fields, one’s business would have blossomed, germinated firmly into the soil of the business environment, and acting as an example for others.
The YES chief executive says she derives her satisfaction from the prosperity of successful applicants who accessed the facility. Additionally, she notes with excitement that business proposals coming in currently reflect the growing familiarity and acceptance of applicants with approaches and techniques that work, and not wild shots in the dark, which do not meet requirements. This shows growing social acceptance of the programme, and general agreement that the effort is worthwhile.
But I also noticed the neatness and seriousness of her office, the highly-polished conference table, all implying executive ability, which would benefit the programme, and make it succeed. This is a comfortable woman in a man’s world, and I would urge our young women to regard her as someone worth aspiring to be like, and more, as they grow up in a highly-competitive society.
With a German first name, Helga is a devoted family woman with two lovely children, and she may well be our upcoming Angela Merkel to watch. For now, she is the saviour of the dreams of our youth, and a believer in their varied talents.