Ghana’s Minister for Inner city and Zongo Development, Mustapha Abdul-Hamid has revealed that his ministry has started a programme to help curb cybercrime among the youth in Zongo communities.
He was speaking at the President’s media encounter when a journalist asked what the government was doing about the increasing cybercrime in the Zongo communities across the country.
The minister said that his ministry has signed an agreement with a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) to help train young people to become coders instead of engaging in cyber fraud.
“We have signed an agreement with an NGO called Initiative for Youth Development which is a Nima-based Zongo NGO.” According to him the NGO is “training for the start 200 young men from our Zongo communities in what we call the Zongo Coders programme.”
The training is to prevent the young ones in the Zongo communities from engaging in cyber fraud and other criminal activities.
The minister said they are training them to also develop apps to solve challenges of the Zongo communities.
“We are training them to identify problems and challenges in our Zongo communities and to develop a software application to resolve those challenges. The idea is to channel their energies from sitting behind the computer and engaging in what is popularly called Sakawa and redirect thus energy towards productive courses.”
He added that the ministry intends to train “1000 young people from the Zongo communities by the end of 2020.”
Zongo settlements are mainly found in West African towns. The inhabitants are mostly people from the Northern parts of a country. In Ghana, most people who live in the Zongos are from the three regions of the north. In terms of religion, Zongo settlers are largely Muslims.
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