Fidelity Bank increases support for women, youth development

Fidelity Bank has reiterated the importance of the country achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the need to equip women and youth to make that dream a reality.

Maata Opare, the Group Head of Legal and Company Secretary of the Bank said, “the implementation of the SDGs is not possible without the empowerment of women and children.”

She was speaking at the Royal Dialogue on the SDGs held at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi recently.

The Dialogue is aimed at discussing ways to support the accelerated implementation of the Goals.

“The private sector needs a paradigm shift from seeing the development of women and the youth as a CSR initiative to viewing them as a key component of their commercial success by pursuing a model which creates additional opportunity and increase the likelihood of successful women.”

Explaining some of Fidelity Bank’s social intervention programmes on women and the youth, Ms Opare said, in 2015 Fidelity Bank in collaboration with international partners launched the Possible-to-Profit Initiative to fund scalable and sustainable projects.

According to her, his collaboration helped the bank to create an innovative financial product that offered low-interest loan security facility to entrepreneurs.

She said the bank also introduced the MASO Project, which is a five-year program to create opportunities for youth in the cocoa industry. The project also trained the youth in financial literacy and the relevant business management skills.

For his part, the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, urged Ghanaians to demonstrate unparalleled leadership in the implementation of the SDGs for the country to experience accelerated growth.

He said the country cannot achieve its full potential if a greater number of people live in abject poverty with no food, they suffer from diseases and have no access to quality education.

“As ambitious as the goals may seem, Ghanaians have a collective duty to achieve the desired results since the goals present us with the greatest opportunity to transform our nation to move from poverty to prosperity, hunger to abundance and from dependence to independence”.

The Ashanti overlord said the key enablers to achieving the goal was through partnership since the government alone cannot implement the actions.

“Traditional authorities have to take great interest in this agenda, as government seeks to integrate this agenda into local development plans, we must appraise ourselves with these plans and work with MMDAs to ensure its successful implantation”, he advised.

Contributing to the Dialogue, Akosua Frema Osei-Opare, the Chief of Staff said, “government has taken up the SDG challenge and has made great strides towards their implementation by establishing a high level ministerial committee as part of a robust institutional structure.”

She added that an SDG implementation committee which draws its membership from government, the private sector, civil societies and the national technical committee has also been established to champion the Goals.

Mrs Osei-Opare mentioned that Ghana signed onto the nation review process and will be reporting on the progress made on the implementation of the SDGs to the global community in June 2019 at the United Nations (UN).