Life is War: Unemployment and Hopelessness of Graduates in Ghana


The problem of unemployment in Ghana among graduates from the universities and other tertiary institutions has reached a breaking point. The various universities, both public and private, churn out thousands of graduates who are unable to find job placements. By the time these graduates come out, they find to their deepest frustration that the job market is choked or that the courses majority of these graduates?chose do not reflect national requirements. A first degree in Russian language or Classics, for example, will not immediately get you a job. The governments of more developed countries always ensure that the numbers of graduates coming out each year from the universities are well educated, skilled and better informed?and well equipped to be easily absorbed in the job market.

Ghana is unable to utilize her knowledgeable and skilled graduates to transform the key sectors of the economy for wealth and poverty reduction. This unfortunate situation is largely due to the fact that Ghana lacks industries and job places to absorb the thousands of graduates that come out?from tertiary institutions yearly. Apart from the public universities, there are more than thirty private universities in Ghana. All of these are producing graduates with no available jobs in sight. To achieve satisfaction among graduates and potential graduates, a new and radical educational policy must be put in place. This must begin from the basic school level through to university level. The government must institute specific admission plans that will benefit the society and instruct the universities about how many students they can admit to specific courses in order to avoid a spill over when they graduate. Entrepreneurial skills must be taught to all students?so that these students will not remain unemployed but be able to use the skills they have acquired to create their own companies.

Apart from the eight public universities, and the accredited degree awarding polytechnics, Ghana now has forty eight private universities. From the University of Ghana alone, 5046 students successfully completed their programmes in the 2011/2012 academic year. Graduands were from the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Graduate Studies. At the Bachelors level, out of 4038 graduating students, a total of 657 students representing 16.3 per cent obtained First Class Honours, while 1181 or 29.2 per cent obtained Second Class Upper. 1711 representing 42.4 per cent obtained Second Class Lower, with 445 representing 11 per cent, obtaining third Class. 24.4 per cent of the 505 Diploma students obtained distinctions, with the remaining obtaining passes. In all there are 503 post-graduates. This is Legon alone. All the graduates coming out from all the universities, both public and private may reach more than sixty thousand every year. It is not likely the country will be able to employ even a third of these graduates. It is interesting to note that majority of these graduates are liberal arts students. If Ghana's future will brighten, there is the need to expand the science and technology departments to be able to take more students.

And with no plan in sight to arrest a situation that is mirrored in dozens of other countries in Africa, graduates are desperately short of options, with some even taking to crime to survive. The rate at which students graduate at very tender ages contributes to the unemployment problems. I will suggest that the number of years students spend at the junior and senior high schools must be increased by one year each. The pension age of government workers must be maintained at the present 60. An appeal must be made to the companies and employers who are fond of retaining pensioners, in order to allow?fresh graduates to be employed.

The Ministry of Education or Parliament must impose stricter conditions on new liberal arts universities to make it more difficult to establish those ones. But we will need more science and technology institutions.

This unemployment problem?has also contributed to the rapid influx of many youths from other parts of the country to the major cities. It is not astonishing that the nation is currently grappling with the unfortunate situation of street hawkers, prostitution, armed robbery and other social vices.

Mr. Divine Nkrumah, a spokesman for the newly-formed Unemployment Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG),?confirmed this to?the Africa Review. Mr. Nkrumah said the UGAG has, so far, registered some 3,500 graduates, with a potential for more as some 68,000 graduates are produced annually by the country's tertiary institutions. He further estimates that there are about 600,000 unemployed graduates in Ghana.

Mr. Nkrumah?affirmed that it is the aim of the association to ensure that all unemployed graduates in Ghana become members so that the plight of the unemployed graduate and all youth left high and dry can be pursued cohesively for the betterment of our dear nation.?

The situation can be?attributed to the lack of coordination between universities and industry. There has not been any effort by academia to involve industry in researching into exactly which areas that required what manpower. As a result, the Ghanaian universities and the other tertiary institutions?are just producing graduates without looking at what areas that they must be sent to. The authorities are aware of producing more liberal arts graduates?over the years and nothing seems to have been done to find a solution to the problem.

According to Mr. Nkrumah, we can only blame the government whom we believe is not putting in place the necessary mechanism to enable companies to operate in? such a way as to generate jobs to enable people get the required employment. Some academics agree with Mr. Nkrumah. The vice-chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), Prof Akwasi Asabre-Ameyaw, said the institution graduates some 4,000 students every year, and out of this number it is known that many of them do not get any form of employment. He concluded that, the growing number of unemployed graduates in itself is a danger to the nation because the devil finds jobs for the idle hands.

A strategy to solve this growing problem is urgently needed.? However, there are also those who think that the problem could be solved if tackled in a systematic way. Prof Olugbemiro Jegede, the secretary general of the Association of African Universities says that graduate unemployment is not just a Ghanaian problem but a continental one. I will suggest that every?university must work on a strategy on the number of people required on the job market.

Prof. Jegede said poor training in universities has brought about a situation where there is always the need to retrain graduates to make them fit the industries that they find themselves, and this is a waste of time and valuable resources. The time has come for the private sector to be involved in the training of graduates so that those that come out of the universities are those that the job market requires.

Things must change. The government should not just sit down but must be seen to be solving the problem in order to make university education meaningful.
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Written by Stephen Atta Owusu
Author: Dark Faces at Crossroads
Email: stephen.owusu@email.com