The Minister of Education, Hon. Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, recently led a team of Young Leaders, mostly CEOs to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, where they had participated in a two-year Residential/Non-Residential Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme (REAP) on Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the National Service Secretariat.
The MIT REAP initiatives provide the requisite tool set in our effort to sustain our economic growth by harnessing our different youth initiatives to improve the collaborative efforts, alignment and rationalization of our resources.
Speaking at the graduation ceremony at the MIT, the Minister stated that Ghana’s decision to associate itself with the programme stemmed from the belief in the track record of the enormous impact that the MIT REAP has on the world’s largest economy. He further set out various initiatives that Ghana has undertaken as a result of benefits accrued from the programme. These include initiatives to formalize the economy through a more favourable tax structure and the addition of the National Service Scheme Practice School to as an entrepreneurial track to the existing corporate and public sector options.
Dr. Prempeh revealed Ghana’s intention to ensure an enhanced, contextualized Ghanaian REAP programme through continuous engagement across various stakeholder groups and touched further on expanded collaboration with MIT REAP to partner with our local academic institutions to drive further progress beyond our 2-year REAP journey.
Ghana was part of Cohort 5 with other participants from Queensland-Australia, Melbourne-Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Quito-Ecuador. At that graduation function was the next cohort 6, entered the program in 2018 with Italy, Denmark, China, Ecuador, U.S.A, Lebanon, Norway, Britain, Mexico and Australia, set to graduate in 2020