All activities are organized in four strongly interconnected programme. Besides the activities in educating the youth, the other three activity areas are summarized as follows:
Education
Empowering the youth means educating the youth. Therefore, the goal is that each and every child has access to primary and secondary education. Not only access to school but as well success in school with meaningful learning outcomes. In rural northern Ghana, teenage pregnancy and child marriage are some of the factors with negative impact on the school cycle of the young woman: Girls who fail in thier school exams risk a future without further options than to marry at a very young age. To fight this problem, YHFG is active in various campaigns and programmes against child marriage and runs its own remedial school. Girls who failed the final exams in the first place can visit the YHFG remedial school classes for free, to get properly prepared for their second second attempt to pass the final exams. After passing the final exams, the girls can continue their secondary school education.
Adolescents sexual and reproductive health and rights
The lack of comprehensive sexual health education and services causes several potential risks for adolescents. When facing problems like sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), teenage pregnancies or unsafe abortions, chances are high that youth will drop out of school. Therefore the YHFG provides appropriate education, supports rights-based advocacy activities and has built up a whole set of programmes for the young people to promote sexual and reproductive health topics.
Entrepreneurial and employable skills for future options
Of course, a proper school-education offers more opportunities. But finishing secondary school level is not a guarantee for a safe future. And by no means everyone can go to university. Therefore, skills and entrepreneur programmes provide step up opportunities for young people to build up working experience and entrepreneurial skills so they can take care of themselves, and their future children.
Agri-business and market system development
Around 90 % of the population in the northern region of Ghana are peasant farmers. Many of them have difficulties to earn a reasonable income. The YHFG agri-business and market access programmes focus is to improve the farmers economic situation. The rationale for this is that this is interconnected with all the other priority areas such as education and health: if the farmers improve their economic situation, they are more likely to better educate their children and let them go to school, as well there will be less need for child marriage out of economic reasons.
