The Looming Crisis Of Unemployed Youth

All is still not well for the several thousands of Ghanaian youth that remain unemployed or under employed with no clear hope of a good job anywhere anytime soon.

The growing army of unemployed youth is frightening. Sadly, the constituency includes well educated young persons including graduates that still cannot find jobs, despite their university qualification.

It is even frightening that a huge number of the unemployed youth are simply unemployable. They are neither lettered nor skilled. They have not learnt any trade or vocation. They have no certificates or academic qualification.

The danger is that they are able bodied young adults with a lot of energy and hot adrenalin running through their veins. Thousands of able bodied adults that are both idle and frustrated.

That is where the danger lies.  An energized, angry and frustrated youth…. hundreds of thousands of them.

The issue of joblessness and or unemployment for that matter, is one crisis THE PUBLISHER is surprised has still not been declared a national emergency.

It is not only the unemployed youth that suffers from the effects of unemployment. It has a direct negative impact on the country’s economy and growth.

When the young adults have a challenge in finding jobs, it simply means they take longer times to get married, settle down and become happy workers paying their taxes.

About two weeks ago, we all had a shocking reminder of this joblessness when over 84,0000 young persons turned up for a recruitment exercise that was expecting just some 500 people.

And that was just for the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS).

Similar or even larger numbers are expected to show up when the Police Service, the Fire Service or the Army announce recruitment exercises.

The National Youth Employment Policy (NYPA), an initiative of former President John Kufuor, was able to mitigate the crisis but has proven not to be an effective or lasting solution.

Clearly, there is a defect with our educational curriculum that trains people to graduate and start to look for nonexistent jobs instead of training people to come out of school with the training to establish jobs themselves.

For decades, our educational module has proven to be defective yet we continue to use the same strategy and expect to get a different answer.  We are sick.

With the introduction of the free Senior High School policy, it is expected that enrolment in schools would go up but as a country, we have not planned on what to do with the products that would be coming out of the schools.

Of course, if nothing is done with a sense of urgency, they would come out of school only to add to the already alarming number of unemployed youth.

Certainly, we need to start thinking right and start thinking now.