Event Overview
On Wednesday, 18th March 2026, The Hangout with Roselyn brought young people, mentors, and industry leaders together at the Cedi Conference Centre, University of Ghana, Legon, for the Youth Mentorship Summit 2026.
The one day summit ran under the theme Curated Youth; Impactful Development, and it was built around a simple promise the organizers made from the very first invitation: real mentors, real conversations, and real direction. Admission was free, and the room filled up early.
The summit was convened by Ms. Roselyn Fosuah Adjei and pulled together a strong lineup of voices from government, academia, the church, agribusiness, and the corporate world. Three ideas ran through the entire day like a thread. Mentorship. Leadership. Purpose. Every speaker, in their own way, kept coming back to those three.
Leadership Aligned With Purpose
The Special Guest of Honour, Hon. Dr. Andy Osei Okrah, Chief Executive Officer of the Tree Crops Development Authority and Founder and President of the Young Professionals and Youth Coalition, set the tone for the day. He described The Hangout with Roselyn as what happens when leadership aligns with purpose, and he reminded everyone that Ms. Roselyn Fosuah Adjei is herself a proud product of the Young Professionals and Youth Coalition. For him, her growth from mentee to convener of a national summit was proof that investing in young people works.
His central message was that mentorship does not happen automatically. It has to be intentional. He pointed to his organization’s own record of nurturing many of today’s leaders, and he described the kind of platform The Hangout with Roselyn has become: a space where young people connect with mentors, learn from real experience, and receive practical guidance on life and career. “We are the architects of the future we want to build,” he told the room.
Dr. Okrah then turned to agriculture, and this is where his session opened a lot of eyes. As CEO of the Tree Crops Development Authority, he spoke about the huge and largely untapped opportunities sitting inside Ghana’s tree crops sector. The Authority, set up under the Tree Crops Development Authority Act 2019 (Act 1010), regulates and develops six strategic economic crops, which he grouped under the label C-CORMS: cashew, coconut, oil palm, rubber, mango, and shea
He made the point plainly that Ghana has leaned on cocoa for a very long time while these six crops have been given little attention, even though they carry real promise for jobs and export earnings. He called them a goldmine for youth employment and economic transformation, and he pointed to recent efforts such as the Ghana Tree Crops Investment Summit as part of the push to open the sector up. His closing thought stayed with the audience: one of the things the youth lacks most is mentorship.
A Product of Mentorship, Now Mentoring Others
If there was a living example of the summit’s theme, it was the convener herself. Ms. Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, who works on REDD+, forest governance, and climate policy, is a proud product of the Young Professionals and Youth Coalition and, by the accounts shared on the day, a strong role model for African women’s leadership.
She carries the three words the summit kept returning to: excellence, purpose, and action. The fact that she built and led a platform like The Hangout with Roselyn, and then filled a whole summit with mentors for the next generation, said as much about the value of mentorship as any speech could.
Keynote Address
The billed keynote speaker was Hon. George Opare Addo, Esq., Ghana’s first Minister for Youth Development and Empowerment. He was unable to attend in person and was represented on the day, with the keynote delivered on his behalf. The Ministry he leads was created specifically to drive youth employment, entrepreneurship, skills, and agribusiness in Ghana, and its role as a partner of the summit tied the day’s conversations to the wider national agenda for young people. Having the Ministry represented at the summit was a clear signal that the work of mentoring and equipping the youth is being taken seriously at government level.
A Research Voice From the University of Ghana
The summit also welcomed Prof. Mary Boatemaa Setrana, Director of the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana and an associate professor of migration and social change, as a guest speaker. Her participation brought a research grounded, academic voice into the room and reflected the kind of institutional support the summit enjoyed from the University of Ghana community.
A Wake Up Call on Agriculture
Few sessions landed as hard as Ms. Enyonam Manye’s. The founder of the brand The Ghanaian Farmer, she spoke on building a dream career, and she did it by telling her own story plainly. She admitted that she once resisted farming, even though it had been her father’s lifetime work, because she had bought into the idea that agriculture is a job for people who did not go to school. It was only after university that she saw the real potential in agriculture and found her purpose in it.
She said she created The Ghanaian Farmer to reorient young people toward agriculture and to break that old and damaging mindset. Her advice to the young people in the room was practical and a little uncomfortable in the best way: take initiative, even in unpaid roles, because that is often where you learn and grow. She backed it with her own experience, reminding the audience that her radio journey started when she volunteered as an unpaid front desk executive. Knowing yourself and being willing to start small, she said, is what helps you learn and grow into any role.
The Power of Intentional Relationships
Rev. Nana Agyei-Kuffuor Yeboah of The Keeper’s House Chapel International closed out the substantive sessions with a talk on healthy relationships that was equal parts pastoral and practical. His argument was that relationships are powerful systems that can either shape or shatter your destiny, so they cannot be left to chance. Relationships, he said, have to be selective and strategic. He put it bluntly that friendship is expensive, so you must decide carefully who gets to be your friend, and that a relationship truly counts when you have someone reliable in it.
He broke a healthy relationship down into its building blocks: trust, respect, communication, and shared experience. He then offered what he called the R’s of relationship, the defining factors worth keeping in mind: reflect, refer, refresh, repair, reprice, and reliable.
On how to actually build and hold on to a relationship, he gave four markers that were easy to remember. There should be genuine interest. It should be intentional, meaning you build the relationship deliberately. It should carry real involvement, being present and supportive. And it should be irreplaceable, shown through loyalty and commitment.
Responsible Adulthood
The summit also featured Mr. Yaw Mpare, Manager of Project Finance at the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, who spoke to the young audience on responsible adulthood, adding a grounded, real world perspective on the choices that shape a young person’s early career and personal life.
Partners and Support
The Youth Mentorship Summit 2026 was organized by The Hangout with Roselyn, with support from the Ministry of Youth Development and Empowerment and a group of partners that included Blue Skies, AirAgenda, White Melon, and Pathbridge International..
Closing Thoughts
By the end of the day, the theme Curated Youth; Impactful Development had stopped feeling like a slogan and started to feel like a description of what had happened in the room. The speakers came from very different worlds, from government and agribusiness to the academy, the church, and corporate finance, yet they were all saying versions of the same thing. Young people rise faster and go further when someone chooses to pour into them on purpose. Mentorship, leadership, and purpose are not three separate ideas. They are the same work seen from different angles.
For a one day, free summit, the Youth Mentorship Summit 2026 delivered exactly what it promised on the invitation: real mentors, real conversations, and real direction. The challenge now, as more than one speaker suggested, is for the young people who sat in that room to go out and do something with it.