Every year, thousands of young Ghanaians step out of university auditoriums, clutching their hard-earned certificates and brimming with hope.
Yet too many of them quickly discover a harsh truth—there are no jobs.
Not because they lack talent or drive, but because the system did not plan for them.
This is not a matter of unemployment alone. It is a deeper issue: Ghana’s tertiary education has no strategic compass.
The institutions we built to train our human resource base are running without a national framework that aligns graduate output with economic demand.
Today, universities admit more and more students into disciplines without a clear sense of national direction.
Some programmes—especially those producing technical, vocational or professional skills—lack adequate controls on intake.
Others are churning out thousands for sectors already oversaturated.
The result? A growing army of graduates trained for jobs that no longer exist—or never did.
GSS
In October 2023, the Ghana Statistical Service reported that over 22 per cent of the unemployed population had tertiary education.
Meanwhile, the 2023 UNDP Human Development Report revealed a youth unemployment rate of 65 per cent among 15–24-year-olds in Ghana, with women most affected.
These are not just statistics—they are human stories. Stories of families investing everything in education, only to meet disillusionment.
We cannot keep running an education system that functions in isolation from national planning and industry.
A World Bank review of youth employment programmes in Ghana (2020) concluded that our labour market was growing too slowly to absorb the sheer number of graduates entering it.
More troubling still, a 2021 report by the African Centre for Economic Transformation found that more than 50 per cent of Ghanaian employers struggle to find candidates with the right skills—even while graduates flood the market.
If we dig deeper, the World Bank’s employment-to-population data tells an even bigger story. In 2000, 73.9 per cent of Ghanaians were employed.
By 2021, that number had fallen to 55.7 per cent.
We are not just facing a graduate crisis—we are facing an absorption crisis.
What is worse, many of the emerging sectors that could create decent jobs—agribusiness, renewable energy, digital technology, waste management—remain neglected in our admissions and curricula strategies. It is not that we lack opportunities.
We simply haven’t planned our human capital around them.
So what do we do?
First, we must treat workforce planning as a national security matter.
The Ministry of Education and National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) need to collaborate on annual skills forecasting and use it to guide admissions.
Second, tertiary institutions must partner directly with industries.
From cybersecurity to agritech, we must update our academic offerings to reflect the future, not the past.
Third, our regulatory bodies—like the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and the National Accreditation Board—must cap admissions in oversubscribed areas and promote growth in underexplored but high-demand fields.
Fourth, universities and the Ministry of Employment should jointly publish annual data on graduate employment outcomes, so that students, parents and investors in education can make informed choices.
Fifth, we must embed practical experience in all degree programmes.
Internships, industrial attachments, and extended national service must become non-negotiable graduation requirements.
Ghana does not lack potential. We lack planning.
Our young people are doing their part. It’s time we did ours. Education is not just a right—it is a responsibility.
Let us reengineer it to meet the needs of a changing world.
If we fail to plan our graduates into the future, we are only planning them into frustration.
The time to act is not tomorrow. It’s now.
Certified Sustainability Leader/advocate.
E-mail: mmedegli@gmail.com
