Unemployment is national security crisis — Haruna Iddrisu
The Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, says there is the need for an all embracing approach to deal with youth unemployment since the situation can pose a threat to national security.
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“Unemployment must be conceived as a national security crisis because if the youth do not have work, with their enthusiasm and energy, they are likely to engage in social vices”, he said.
The minister was speaking at a technical workshop on ‘Enabling youth potential in Ghana’ organised by the World Bank in Accra yesterday.
Unemployment in Ghana
He said the unemployment rate in the country was worrying considering the fact that the informal and formal sectors were unable to employ them.
In some countries, where youth unemployment had not been addressed and managed properly, it had escalated into riots, he stated.
He noted that youth unemployment in Ghana could be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity depending on how one saw it.
He said the country had youth who were skilled but the challenge was how to harness the potential of the skilled youth toward productive energies.
Mr Iddrisu, therefore, called on the private sector to do more to employ the youth, saying that with a population of more than 24 million people, the private sector employed only 700,000 people, a situation which, he said, should also be of concern to the sector.
Private sector participation
He also called on the private sector to reconsider the situation where they required some years of experience from potential employees, saying that “without the opportunity how can university graduates gain the required experience”.
Admitting that there was evidence of skills gap in some sectors of the economy, Mr Iddrisu said many of the youth were simply unemployable because they lacked the required skills to enter some areas of the job market.
In the area of entrepreneurship, he said people must look at opportunities for self employment, adding that although the government was responding to issues of youth unemployment through the setting up of funds such as the Youth Enterprise Support, access to credit continued to be a bane for them.
Giving an overview of the workshop, the Programme Leader, Human Development, World Bank, Ms Kathleen Beegie, said the workshop was meant to gather views on how the public and private sectors could work together to create employment opportunities for the youth.
The workshop, she said, was also to identify constraints that limited the private sector from employing more young people and also factors which prevented the youth from creating their own businesses.
As part of the workshop, synopsis of findings from two studies undertaken in 2015 were disseminated.
The first study was on “Youth jobs profile, constraints and challenges: An overview of Ghana labour market” and the second one was on “Understanding adolescent and youth work deficit.”
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