Large youth population requires more job avenues

Youth unemployment is a global challenge. In Ghana and many African countries, it is graver because the continent has experienced a consistent population growth rate over the last 25 years, with the youth forming the largest proportion.

Out of the 34 million population, 38 per cent is under age 15, with the age structure of the population shifting towards the older ages. This simply means that the economy must create more jobs to absorb the teeming number of people completing secondary and tertiary education. Many are also acquiring skills through the vocational and technical educational institutions, and by apprenticeship.

The large youth population is, however, good news for higher productivity critical to eliminating poverty, depending on how the phenomenon is tackled.

The reverse is that any shortfall in activities and interventions necessary to actively engage the large proportion of the youth will be counterproductive. It will be a recipe for social vices, unproductiveness and depleting of resources.

This is why the Daily Graphic welcomes any effort by the state to enable the private sector to function effectively in order to absorb the large population of the youth in gainful employment

 It has been widely accepted that while the state alone cannot execute this task, it needs to create the right ambience — enabling environment — for the private sector to increase the job openings to absorb the large number of youth and the employable hands within the population.

Whereas the Ghana Statistical Service has put the number of people without jobs at 1.9 million as of last year, it says 7.3 million are also multidimensionally poor, having deprivations in either education, health, living conditions or employment.

These staggering statistics can be turned around when there are more job opportunities to engage the active population, the youth. Setting up more productive entities in both the public and private sectors is the way out of the youth unemployment.

This is why the Daily Graphic views the 100,000 people who have been given job opportunities under various modules as a good example of initiatives that can be scaled up to create more employment avenues.

The beauty of creating job avenues for one person is its magical likelihood of positively impacting about two more persons. Like the YEA example, the 100,000 employed positively impacted the livelihoods of over 500,000 individuals in the last four years.

YEA was set up to, among other goals, work towards reducing youth unemployment through skills development, monetary assistance and startups to enable the youth to create employment for themselves and others.

Given the impact, the Daily Graphic supports similar exercises by both public and private sector actors. Productive employment creation should be planned around careful industrialisation efforts. There are too many things the country imports that can be replaced with local substitutes.

Agriculture remains a pro-labour productive activity that should be tackled with all seriousness. Besides creating thousands of jobs for the youth, it holds the potential to feed industry with raw materials for processing.

Currently, the country engages in little farming by volume and less amount of processing. Rice, maize, sorghum, millet, mangoes, pawpaw, pineapple, coconut and cassava are staples and commodities that the country should have achieved self-sufficiency in by now. Imagine the employment generation along the value chain.

A lot has been done by successive administrations. The disconnection has been the lack of continuity and better prioritisation. The services sector, including tourism, information and communication technology, as well as light industrial activities such as textiles and garment production are also areas that should be well tackled with all the force and precision to absorb a chunk of the teeming youth.

The Daily Graphic believes that these are a few low-hanging fruits that can be harnessed with speed to create jobs, reduce demand for foreign exchange and generate revenue for the country.