The Chief Executive Officer of the National Youth Authority (NYA), Pius Hadzide, says the government’s interventions to create jobs are achieving their goals by providing adequate jobs for the country’s teeming unemployed youth.
According to him, the interventions have led to increased production in the country, and boosted the country’s GDP.
Speaking on the Point of View, Mr. Hadzide said the government has ensured the employment of many young people in factories established under the 1-District 1-Factory initiative and initiatives like the Year-of-Return campaign among others in the agricultural and tourism sectors.
“Generally speaking, these policies are achieving their objectives. We doing the year-of-return, beyond the return, planting for food and jobs and all that is in line with the World Bank’s report which recommends agribusiness and industrialization as areas of opportunity”
“Even in the short-term under 1D 1F alone, we are recruiting about 152,000 young people at the factories directly and indirectly… Millions of people, including young people are benefiting from Planting for Food and Jobs. We have NABCO to augment and make the public service effective,” he added.
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Mr. Hadzide argued that while the unemployment situation is alarming and a security threat, it cannot be said that the situation of unemployment is worsening in the country.
Recent happenings including the mad rush for recruitment into the country’s security agencies and the massing up of teeming youth at the Accra International Conference Centre to seek jobs at a Youth Employment Agency job fair have sparked conversations about the levels of unemployment and the desperation to find jobs in the country.
But Mr. Hadzide believes that the government is on course in addressing the problem of unemployment.
Meanwhile, the Acting Director of the Foundation for Security Development in Africa (FOSDA), Theodora Williams Anti, has called on the government to invest more in technical and vocational education training to ensure that the country’s youth come out with useful skills that makes them easily employed.
She said many of the government’s unemployment interventions are short-termed programmes that cannot adequately address the problem.
While describing unemployment as a serious national security threat, she expressed regret over the decline in funding to TVET programmes in the country.
“All these interventions are great but can we channel them through a more structured system like our educational system, specifically TVET which will give us a long-term impact and something we can rely on rather than channeling through these programs that benefit only a few people,” she said.
“We support some of these short-term interventions, but we are thinking of long term… We think that over the years, our governments have not invested much in our TVET system. We have only seen between 1%-5% of education funds channeled to TVET,” she added.
