Explainer: Why Ghana's educational system is breeding massive graduate unemployment

Explainer: Why Ghana's educational system is breeding massive graduate unemployment

- Ghana’s youth unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world and is going to be a serious threat to the state in the near future

- The issue of graduates unemployment has become very high that there are no enough jobs in the system to absorb them all

- Ghana's form of education is in such a way that it makes students become dependent or reliant to the system

For many years, Ghana’s educational system has been touted as one of the best in West Africa and across the continent.

The country’s problem has never been about churning out graduates or qualified personnel, but rather unemployment.

In fact, there are numerous graduates in Ghana, who are well-qualified in their fields of study, but are without jobs.

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So, it begs the question: is the country’s educational system helping to breach the unemployment gap or rather widening it?

This can be attributed to the country’s over-dependence on a seemingly outdated educational system which needs to be ditched.

Entrepreneurship education has been found to present a contemporary solution to global graduate unemployment.

For Ghana, though, we are still stuck to the old ways where students are predominantly trained for white-collar jobs.

As a result, many students go through the education system with the mindset to graduating and taking up jobs in “offices”.

The problem with this is that, there are limited spaces for such jobs and until we begin to train entrepreneurs, the unemployment levels could keep rising.

Ghanaian schools, colleges and universities in the late 1950s and early1960s were producing skilled workforce for the then young nation.

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The focus, then, was on science, technology and a lot industrialization. Currently, though, many graduates from university are without the requisite experience.

Take their certificates away from them and they’ll be left with nothing. But it shouldn’t be so, at all.

What entrepreneurship education does is to equip the youth with functional knowledge and skills in wealth creation.

This way, they wouldn’t need to wait to be employed when they graduate. Rather, they would already have the requisite skills to set themselves up after school.

They become self-motivated, innovative and, more importantly, curb graduate unemployment by becoming self-employed.

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As it stands, unemployment levels in Ghana continue to rise. And with the implementation of the Free SHS, it is only a matter of time before more graduates join in this unwanted company.

However, the situation can be contained if entrepreneurship education is taken more seriously and integrated into our national education system.

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Source: YEN.com.gh

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