Tamale, Ghana – The public voting to select 100 influential personalities out of a list of 199 eminent nominees from different professional and career backgrounds has ended successfully.
The public voting was phase one of the implementation of “The 100 Most Influential Personalities From Northern Ghana” (The 100 MIPs) project.
The 100 MIPs is an initiative of Tamale based media and development communication company, Rudder Communications (RudCom) and its subsidiary, SavannahNewsOnline.Com.
The 100 MIPs is a human capital development project that seeks to encourage young people to read the biographies and autobiographies of successful and influential people so as to boost their level of confidence to enable them achieve their goals in life.
The annual project is intended to benefit children in basic and senior high schools as well as those at the tertiary level in the Upper West, Upper East, North East, Northern and the Savannah Regions of Ghana.
According to Executive Director of RudCom, Joseph Ziem, the objective of the project is “to use the success stories of successful and influential citizens from Northern Ghana to inspire school children and other young people to dream big. It also seeks to whip up interest in reading amongst children at the basic and senior high school levels so as to enhance their level of literacy.
“Furthermore, it seeks to ignite the interest of the youth from Northern Ghana in entrepreneurship through the inspiring success stories of some of the personalities”, he said in a statement issued on Friday to mark an end to the public voting which began on July 2, 2019.
The next phase of the project, which begins this August, is to write the citations and biographies of all the 100 personalities. “We are now going to contact each of the 100 individuals and request for their curriculum vitaes to enable us develop their citations.
“We will also write their biographies and publish them in what we call ‘The 100 MIPs magazine’ which each of them are expected to buy enough copies for schools and public libraries in the communities or districts they come from”, Mr. Ziem said.
On what outcome his organisations expect to see after the implementation of the project, he said he hoped to see a boost in the literacy level amongst young people vis-à-vis their proficiency in reading, comprehension and ability to write and speak effectively.
He also, indicated that schoolchildren in the beneficiary communities getting to understand how each of the 100 personalities made it in life would go a long way to boost the level of confidence of young people and enable them to dream of anything they so desire to achieve in life.
The biographies and autobiographies of each of the 100 personalities, he added, would greatly influence schoolchildren and other young people positively to decide which career path to chart, what challenges they are to expect in life and how they could overcome such challenges among others.
“We believe this concept which is solely being spearheaded by RudCom and Savannah News would make a lot of difference in the lives of our younger siblings who are still in school and even those who have completed JHS and SHS. Majority of those in school don’t get that opportunity of having someone who’s ahead of them in life to advise them on what subjects or courses to read in order to help them properly decide on their future profession or career. And we’re certain that the biographies and autobiographies of each of the 100 personalities which would be published as a magazine would greatly influence our younger ones positively to decide which career path to chart, what challenges they are to expect in life and how they can overcome such challenges among others”, Mr. Ziem who is also Chief Editor of Savannah News pointed out.
Meanwhile, 199 individuals from different professional and career backgrounds were nominated in ten different categories for the public voting. Out of the 199 nominees, 121 nominees (22 females and 99 males) got votes at the close of voting. 100 out of the 121 people got adequate votes in order to make it to the list of “The 100 MIPs”.
Amongst the female nominees, the MCE for Sagnarigu Municipality, Mrs. Mariam Iddrisu got the highest number of votes (1,076) to claim the eleventh position in the ranking whereas amongst the male nominees Martin Ariku Akudugu, CEO of Ariku Farms, got the highest number of votes (11,140) to claim the first position in the ranking.
Below is the list of the 100 MIPs
By Savannahnewsonline.com/Philip Liebs