The Vice-Chancellor of the Sunyani Technical University (STU), Professor Kwadwo Adinkra Appiah, has admonished that training and entrepreneurial development by technical universities are the remedies to curbing rising graduate unemployment in the country and, therefore, must be given the needed support.

Professor Appiah was of the view that the practically oriented courses undertaken by students help them acquire the needed maximum skills to setting up their own businesses as well as creating employment opportunities for others.

Speaking to Class News in an exclusive interview, the Vice Chancellor also denounced the notion that technical education was for the weak, saying it is a medium to train and impact skills in students to become business-oriented and tackling unemployment in Ghana.

“Technical education is not for the weak... The point is that if you want to develop a nation, it is based on technical education,” he stated.

“If you go to Germany – that is the model that we are applying – they have universities of applied sciences and [they are] basically based on technical education, because you cannot train people with just the theory and they cannot marry it with practicals and so that is exactly what we are doing here in Sunyani Technical University. We give you the theory, we blend it with the practicals, so that as soon as you finish you will be able to be employed in industry directly, because you would have acquired the skills to work.”

According to him, it is an extra cost on industry to train staff who only learnt theories from schools without any practical work.