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Ghana’s Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has stated that Ghanaian youth and graduates lack the necessary skill sets for the country’s available jobs.
Ken Ofori-Atta is a Ghanaian politician. According to the minister, there is a significant disconnect between what students/graduates learn in school and what industry demands.
In the face of rising youth unemployment, he stated that the country’s educational institutions, particularly universities, must connect their training with industrial needs.
“In a global economy driven by digitization, we have roughly 9 million people, but despite the fact that the jobs are going in that direction, we only have about a thousand graduates with IT related skills each year from our higher institutions. He wondered, “What has lulled universities to sleep without understanding this enormous shift in the world’s direction?”
Mr. Ofori-Atta repeated that there are positions available, but graduates are unable to fill them because they lack the necessary skills.
“What do we do with the 85 percent of unemployed kids who have just completed secondary school? How can we provide them with vocational training so that they can become productive citizens?” Over half of tertiary degree enrollment is in fields with little or no future growth potential. “How can we address this in the way we educate our graduates?”
he said at the 73rd Annual New Year School & Conference at the University of Ghana. “Employers are already feeling the pinch in the misalignment in our inadequacy of talent for their needs and therefore the drop in their looking for internships from our graduates. They report hard-to-fill positions despite high unemployment and we should be able to do something about that,” he added. Watch video of the Minister’s speech below;
