Youth Development Programme

The youth development programme is part of the immediate needs to enhance change thematic area of Trans4orms’s programmes. It is a creative and empowering programme that combines providing immediate needs in ways that does not only empower the recipients of the support but also facilitates a process that builds networking among youth in the programmes to reach other youth in their catchment area. It enables solidarity building alongside empowerment.

Youth in the Arts: Trans4orm is supporting two talented groups to produce music in different forms as part of their empowerment process. One of the two is Nana Ahenkain, a solo artiste and the other, a group of young and talented brass instrumentalists called Lyrikal Brazz. Nana Ahenkain: Nana Ahenkain is a talented but poor rap artiste who has written over 30 tracks but has no support to produce any of the 30 until he reached Trans4orm. People who have listened to his three recorded tracks described him as a big challenge for popular rap artiste Obrafor. Nana Ahenkain sounds very much like Obrafor but has a more powerful and strong touch to his rich lyrics that even Obrafor will envy. Due to the lack of support, Ahenkain got into bad company and had brushes with the law enforcement agencies through no fault of his. Through Trans4orm, the Accra based Ahenkain has recorded 3 of the tracks and is working to produce more for his debut album and videos for two of the tracks that would be launched in 2013. If Ahenkain is successful, he will take on 3 other such young artistes of which two must be girls and support them through their recording. Those other artistes would also support other artistes to ensure the support is spread to benefit many more such young people. There are a large number of young and talented artistes who either get exploited by seniour musicians who they approach for support or get deceived into committing crimes.
We will keep you posted on the various stages of the Nana Ahenkain and his album project and urge anyone who is interested in joining trans4orm to get the young artiste into the lime light to join us do so.

Lyrikal Brazz: This is a group of very young and talented children and youth in the Adidome area of the Volta Region of Ghana. Their ages range between 8 to 24 years. The group is made up of 11 girls and 19 boys. Each of the young people play a brass instrument in what is called in Ghana as brass band music, they play at parties, weddings and funerals. The aim of putting this young people together is threefold: The first is to use the medium of music to bring young people together and facilitate their empowerment and to ensure they are able to learn human rights, women’s rights and serve as catalysts of change in the respect of women’s and girl’s rights in the area. Secondly, the young people are given the opportunity to support each other in their studies at school. The support mechanism ensures they stay and not drop out of school. This process also brings out the musical talent in the children and takes them away from vices as they spend their free time learning to play instruments or rehearse for an impending engagement at a party, wedding or funeral in the area. This process of building an empowered and influential Children and Youth movement through the arts allows for the children to learn and work whilst having fun with each other and also inspiring other youth to join them and thereby increasing the influence of the programme. Lyrikal Brazz also hopes to produce young and energetic brass instrumentalists for Ghana’s security forces in the near future. We will keep you posted on the development of the group as we try to assemble new instruments for them. If you are interested in this innovative process of building an empowered youth movement, please contact us now at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Sports for Rights: Our next area of innovative intervention is the use of sports especially soccer to bring communities and youth groups together for rights education and empowerment to demand accountability from community leaders, local government officials. This also includes a bid to bring sporting greats and their various foundations together to one united and well-funded foundation equal to any strong foundation or funding agency anywhere in the world. Trans4orm believes we have everything we need here in Africa and here in Ghana that can be used to support development work.

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