Youth and Sports Minister Cornelia Wonkerleh Kruah challenged Gonet Academy on Saturday to grow from a private training center into part of Liberia’s national development structure, and offered her ministry’s help in tracking graduates from training into work.
By Patience M. Jones [email protected]
Minister Kruah was keynote speaker at the Academy’s 15th graduation ceremony on October 31, 2026, at the Harvest Intercontinental Cathedral, where 909 students received certificates and diplomas.
Gonet Academy opened in February 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most institutions were closing their doors. It has since produced more than 5,000 alumni, enough, the minister joked, to form a staff several times larger than her own ministry’s.
The school offers more than 20 courses, from ten-week certificates to six-month comprehensive programs, in procurement, project management, monitoring and evaluation, financial management, logistics and supply chain, data analysis and marketing.
Founder and Chief Empowerment Officer Mohammed Kerkulah said the 909 figure counts individual graduates, and that some completed two or more courses. Counting every course, he said, total certifications exceed 940.
Of the graduates, 208 completed the six-month Comprehensive Professional Programme and 47 the Professional Diploma Programme. The Foundation Certificate Programme produced the largest number. Women made up 530 graduates, or 58.3 percent of the class, and men 379, or 41.7 percent.
Mr. Kerkulah said the Academy’s reach extends beyond Monrovia, noting that some online students from other parts of Liberia were visiting its office for the first time for the ceremony. He also said surpluses from each cohort have been reinvested in the institution rather than used for personal gain. “We are not driven by greed,” he said.
The minister’s address centered on what she called the cost of leaving youth potential to chance. Liberia has about 5.5 million people, roughly three in four of them young, and a median age of about 19. By her arithmetic, one in every 4,400 young Liberians was graduating in the hall that morning, about 0.02 percent of the country’s youth.
“For every year we delay, we pay twice,” she said: once in talent that leaves or sits idle, and again in skills the country imports to do work its own young people could do.
After taking office, she said, she traveled to all 15 counties, meeting young people in town halls and on football fields. She found youth who were “sharp, curious and restless to build something,” but few structures to find them early, develop them and carry them into work or enterprise. Borrowing the physics term entropy, she said that energy is not lost but scattered.
“Some of it leaves the country. Some of it turns into frustration. Most of it is left to luck,” she said, “and no nation should plan its future on luck.”
Minister Kruah opened with humor, joking that Procurement graduates would want to know whether her keynote had gone through competitive bidding. “It did not. It was sole-sourced. I accepted anyway,” she said.
She then pushed back on the idea that the fields the graduates studied are “soft.” “I call them plumbing,” she said. “Nobody admires the pipes, but try running a house without them.” Every mining concession, government road, partner investment and growing business, she argued, depends on such skills. “A country can sign a hundred agreements,” she said. “Without people who can plan, buy, hire, measure and manage, they stay on paper.”
An economist by training, the minister placed Gonet’s work in a global frame, noting that countries have taken different roads to prosperity.
Qatar, she said, saved its gas surplus in one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds and invested in universities, research and training, with average income rising from under $3,000 a year in 1970 to above $70,000 today. The United Arab Emirates treated oil “as a bridge, not a destination,” and about three-quarters of its economy is now non-oil. Botswana entered independence in 1966 with only 22 university graduates, then used diamond revenue to develop “not just the roads, but the people,” and is now an upper-middle-income country.
For countries with nothing to dig, she pointed to Singapore, where income per person rose from about $500 in 1965 to above $90,000. The decisive choice, she said, was training people for targeted industries and changing the training whenever those industries changed. She also cited Rwanda, whose Vision 2050 aims for high-income status by mid-century.
“If some countries can be built on gas and others on people, Liberia can be built on both,” she said. Liberia has iron ore, gold, timber, rubber, fertile land and the sea, she noted, but its young people are a second inheritance that “does not need to be mined, but nurtured.”
Minister Kruah urged Gonet’s leadership not to be satisfied with attendance. “A full hall is a good start,” she said, but the question for the next five years is whether the school can become a model “government can look at and say: this works, let us back it and scale it.”
She said she did not know every detail of Gonet’s model, but its ability to draw young Liberians cohort after cohort suggests real value. “People do not keep coming back to a place that gives them nothing,” she said.
She then posed what she called harder questions: Where do Gonet’s graduates go? What do they earn a year later? Which skills will Liberia need in 2030, not just in 2026?
The Ministry of Youth and Sports is asking itself the same questions, she said, through *PATHWAYS: Rooting and Rising Liberia’s Youth*, its ten-year vision. The plan puts evidence, design and foresight at the center of the ministry’s work. She defined foresight as “looking ahead on purpose,” meaning studying emerging trends and jobs so that young people in classrooms today are prepared for the economy of 2035. Evidence, she said, means judging a program by what happens to the young people in it.
On that basis, the ministry’s foresight work wants to partner with institutions like Gonet to follow young people from training into work, “so we can see where they land and what they still need.”
One of PATHWAYS’ pillars, the Pathway Framework, aims to build an ecosystem that moves young Liberians from exclusion to agency, from training into work and from ideas into enterprises. “Gonet is already part of that ecosystem,” she said. The administration, she added, has placed young people at the center of its ARREST Agenda, and PATHWAYS is how her ministry intends to deliver on that commitment over the next decade.
Turning to the graduates, the minister invoked an idea attributed to Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine: that small “islands of coherence” can shift an entire system to a higher order. Such an island, she said, is a place where people show up, keep their word, do the job properly and help others do the same.
She illustrated the point with Desh Garments, a Bangladeshi company that in 1979 sent 130 young workers to South Korea to learn garment making to world standards. Within a few years, 115 of them had left to start their own garment businesses and trained others who did the same. Bangladesh is today one of the world’s largest clothing exporters. “It began with 130 people in a training programme,” she said. “You are more than 900. Think about that.”
She urged the graduates to keep learning, produce accurate reports, run clean procurement, start the businesses they have been talking about and hire young people who remind them of themselves. She also encouraged them to return to Gonet with ideas to improve it, since people who pass through a model “usually see its flaws first.”
Mr. Kerkulah, who recalled earning about US$100 a month as an intern roughly six years ago, urged graduates to “never, never limit yourself.” He said the Academy belongs to its graduates as well as its founders and that he hopes they will take an interest in its growth.
Minister Kruah closed by congratulating Cohort 15, their families, “some of whom paid the fees and said the prayers,” and the Academy. “This morning, the most valuable reserve this country holds grew by 909,” she said.
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