Senior multimedia journalist – JoyNews

One of the key issues that many people, especially young people, continue to grapple with in my community, is youth unemployment. The education structure in many African economies places less emphasis on jobs and the creation of job opportunities. Ghana’s current unemployment rate is over 13 per cent with young graduates spending an average of at least 2 years to land their first real job. The situation creates a fertile ground for young people to lose faith in the state and become vulnerable to many vices including terrorism and the temptation to embark on dangerous migration routes to Europe with huge risks to their lives. People struggle to understand the basics of enhancing employability skills and building the needed environment that would make people job-ready. This is because the education structure generally in Ghana and many parts of Africa do not respond to jobs and the changing requirements for job especially in the changing global trends. Generally, there is data available on the problem of unemployment in Ghana mainly by the country’s Statistics Service. However, such data is difficult to access especially for journalists like myself and for people who are in research for example. The solution would be for people working on such data to make them readily available and accessible to inform better public discourse on the subject and to also be a part of government policy.