MORE YOUTH ENGAGE IN VACATION JOBS (PAGE 29)

VACATION jobs for the teeming unemployed youth in the Tamale metropolis have peaked in recent times.
A significant number of youth who are predominantly school leavers have been engaged either as mobile-to-mobile phone service providers or hawkers of cosmetic products and toiletries, particularly from office to office in the metropolis.
Indeed, the youth get paid for whatever they do although some of them complain that the wages they receive are meagre, compared to the workload.
Most of them are found roaming the streets in the scorching sun doing brisk business to earn a living.
Those who hawk the cosmetic products get paid depending on how much sales they make in a day.
A significant number of these hawkers are females who are either on vacation or are school leavers.
The females do brisk business compared to their male counterparts, as the former are more persuasive than the latter in getting customers to patronise their goods.
The females have awesome marketing strategies that earn them admiration from their buyers who are enticed to buy their products.
They serve as agents of companies, most of which are located in Accra.
One of the ladies in that business, who gave her name only as Hawa, could best be described as an intelligent and smart hawker.
Before she leaves an office she makes sure she persuades you to buy some of her wares.
She claimed she had been in that business for sometime but would continue her education up to the university level if she obtains good results.
Most of the lady hawkers, however, admitted that although some men made advances at them they were careful to avoid immoral acts that would ruin their future.
Rufai Abdulai is a mobile-to-mobile phone operator who usually sits adjacent to the Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) Tamale main branch building.
He has completed senior secondary school but needs to rewrite a few of the papers to enable him achieve his dreams of gaining admission into the university.
Abdulai told this reporter that he earned less than GH¢50 and that he made a lot of money during “pay-days” or when workers were paid at the end of the month.
According to him, one needed about GH¢300 to start business but added that one needed to re-invest in the business in order to keep it going.
Abdulai said that sometimes he encountered problems when transferring units from his mobile phone to a customer’s mobile phone.
“You can transfer the units and your customer can tell you he or she did not receive it; you can also transfer the units and it could be more than what the customer paid for in which case it becomes a debt because some of the customers would not tell you that you transferred more units to them than what they required,” he pointed out.
Abdulai said he paid GH10p daily to the assembly task force for occupying the space where he had erected a small canopy to transact the business.
“All of us you see lined up here are not going to retire on this job because we have bigger dreams ahead of us. One of my colleagues recently sold all the items he was using for the business and went back to school and to be specific, the University for Development Studies,” he stressed.
It is heart-warming to note that the youth, at least, are trying to earn some income before moving on in life, for “a thousand miles’ journey begins with a first step”.