Accra, Ghana//-Emerging Public Leaders of Ghana (EPL Ghana), an organisation committed to empowering the next generation of public service professionals has appealed to supervisors in Ghana’s public and private sectors not to limit its fellows to buying food, pickers of newspapers, and other unproductive things.
According to the NGO, its outfit had received reports from some of the fellows that it spends thousands of dollars to train and mentor and deploy to the public and private sectors to innovate and drive change in the sectors were rather turned into food buyers, pickers of newspapers, and other unproductive things in some of these public and private institutions.
The Country Director of EPL Ghana, Madam Juliet A. Amoah made this known at the maiden Public Sector Fellowship’s Supervisors’ Soiree held in Accra over the weekend.
“We have invested a lot in these fellows. We spend huge sums of money to train and equip them during their one-year fellowship”.
Don’t refer to our fellows as interns
Ms Amoah also used the event to appeal to the supervisors and the public to desist from labelling the EPL Ghana’s Public Sector Fellows as interns because they are not.
They are on a fellowship programme and the EPL has loaned them to the public and private sector organisations to help mould them so that at the end they will showcase what they are able to do with this public service primarily. So, their preferred title should be associates or fellows. For instance, project associates or project fellows.
Her comment comes at the backdrop of information that she had received that some organisations referred to their fellows posted to those organisations as interns.
“But our fellows are more than interns because we invest so much in them, we do deep-dive training, they go into communities for projects, and we also train them on various contemporary workplaces, excel, budgeting, among others. So, when they come into your organisations, they are not the typical interns that you see around. They have so much more to offer, and we encourage you to give them the opportunity to support your work”. Ms Amoah said.
Young people are not just the future, but…
She and her team at the EPL Ghana believe that these young people are not just the future, but they have the voice of the future. They have the voice of the future, so they must come to the table to build their innovative ideas.
These guys and girls must come to the table with the right energies to try to start changing the way that “we do business, especially public business or the business of the government”.
Ms Amoah observed: “For many years we left the business of the government to older politicians and technocrats, but we think we do need to have enough voices who are deep in ethnically thinking, moral judgement, able to act, and also to drive change”.
It is not always an easiest of task
It is not always the easiest of tasks. These young people after all are the representation and the representative of the society that we live in. So, after 26 years of living in a society that shapes them in a certain way, they do start to change in a certain way.
So, our task within the one year or two years that they are with us, is a critical point because we are trying to make them learn and unlearn, the Executive Director Ms Amoah noted.
“First, we are trying to get them to unlearn certain things and then we give them new learnings. So, yes, we empower them to become critical thinkers. We are saying that they are always active, but you (supervisors) have worked with them closely and I am sure that you will be the best judges”.
Help us to shape them better
So, tonight is kind of like a feedback session. We want to understand how you can help us to shape them better. We see you as our gatekeepers and our go-to persons. We can say that you are the champions. You have been in these organisations for long enough, you get to go to these high-level meetings with these fellows. So, you supervisors are the best to give us feedback on their performance and behaviours, according to her.
“Since we recruited high-performing individuals, we are hoping that these high-performing individuals will be people that you get to take with you into meetings that we lobbied for. We lobbied for them to get a seat at the table. When they get those seats at the table, we will do our best to make sure that they contribute their quotas to the growth and development of the organisations”.
Gratitude
Ms Amoah used the opportunity to express gratitude to all the supervisors at the public and private institutions for their selflessness saying that it is not always easy to hand holding young people especially when they think that they know all.
“So, sometimes it is difficult to handhold these young people. Sometimes you are busy with your policy briefs, reports among others yet you have to force and actually bring these fellows who are not as experienced as yourselves. It is not always a comfortable thing to do. So, I really want to thank you on my own behalf and on behalf of the amazing organisation that I represent, Emerging Public Leaders of Ghana”.
The role of supervisors
On his part, Partnerships Manager at EPL Ghana, Harrison Owusu said the role of supervisors could be aligned to that of a big brother or a big sister who had been able to chart a certain path and had learned all the challenges and there were able to hold the hands of the little brother or sister who had now come to that space.
“So, we believe that once these fellows graduate from the universities, their first interaction with the world of work is when they engage with you”.
He highlighted some of the areas that he thought the supervisors had done amazing work and supported the Public Sector Fellowship (PSF).
Such areas Mr Owusu mentioned were guidance for career development, skills development, performance appraisal, accountability, and support.
“So, we don’t take this lightly because we know that EPL fellowship is quite uniquely placed in a sense that we also incorporate performance appraisal. We want to hear your feedback. We want to know how the fellows are faring and what kind of guidance and opportunities they need to grow in their space”.
Impacts
Also, in terms of impacts, we believe that once the fellows engage with you supervisors, you will be able to strengthen their capacity and continuity of your institutions. Sometimes, it is also good to have fellows to support your work and you also give them knowledge transfer and strategic alignment to the institutions or the organisations as well as helping EPL to achieve its goals, Mr Owusu added.
“We value some of your ability to be able to retain them in your organisations because as you know youth unemployment is a big challenge that Ghana is facing. And you also contribute to employing these young people in your various organisations. So, you are helping to reduce unemployment in the county”.
Somebody may ask what is the end goal for the placement? He explained that their hope is that when the fellows complete their one-year fellowship, they would be retained to support the supervisors’ work in the public and private sectors.
The management of the EPL Ghana’s fellowship which has a record 87% retention rate said it has invested so much into training and building the capacity of its fellows, so it doesn’t want them to leave the organisations after the fellowships.
In terms of testimonial or good examples of successful supervisor partnership: we had instances where supervisors have become programme allies and supervisors have also provided support to our recruitment process. We also have some supervisors who have become full-time mentors for our fellows, Mr Owusu said.
Increase the number of fellows
The Programmes Coordinator at EPL Ghana, Barima Kwasi Amankwah Boafo Amagyei disclosed that the organisation is going to increase the number of fellows in-take possibly a bit higher in the coming years to enable it to reach its goal by 2027.
“As an organisation running this fellowship programme, we have a goal and it is quite ambitious, that is to be able to train 500 dedicated fellows by 2027. This is very ambitious”, he stated.
“How will we do that? That is where you all come in as various partners. We will continue to seek for more funding because we are a non-governmental organisation (NGO) and so donor funding keeps us running our programes and we are able to deliver on our impact”.
To this end, Mr Boafo Amagyei indicated that they are also looking to partner with more public sector institutions to get the fellowship which is currently running its sixth fellowship.
For 2023, the EPL Ghana recruited 25 fellows from some few selected regions in the country. In terms of organisations, they placed these fellows in two public sector organisations and nine civil society organisations.
Comparing that to 2024, “we made progress by increasing our intake of fellows to 35 fellows this year. We recruited from nine regions out of the 16 regions, which is an increase of five. We have a visually impaired fellow placed at the Ministry of Finance who currently works there as well”.
The Programmes Coordinator at EPL Ghana continued: “In terms of organisation placements, we now placed our fellows on five public sector organisations as compared to two in 2023. Whereas we have seven placements in civil society organisations. That is the current statistics of the programme”.
Awards
At the end of the event, three long-standing supervisors of the fellowship programme who excelled in their supervisory roles were awarded.
