The Director General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Grace Bediako has advised unemployed youth to seek opportunities in the agriculture sector as the job market keeps shrinking.
Explaining the cause of rising unemployment rate in the country, she noted that automation of processes and machine driven jobs is taking a lot of people out of jobs.
“Mining is totally driven by machines so needs just a few people to operate large machines in doing a lot of production and generating a lot of income,” she said.
“Automation of processes in the banking sector is really taking people out of the job market and there’s the need to balance these,” she added.
She further proposed focus on labour intensive job areas such as agriculture to fill in the gap.
“The agriculture sector so far is labour intensive so we need to encourage more people into farming to enable more job creation.”
She however, concurred that the government’s Planting for Food and Jobs and One District, One factory initiatives when properly implemented and scaled up will enable more jobs.
She bemoaned what she calls a disconnect between the educational system and job creation where entrepreneurship isn’t inculcated into students but was quick to add that the Ministry of Education is reviewing the curriculum to encourage a more practical approach to the system.
Dr Grace Bediako revealed these at a Pre-May Day forum organised by the Friedrich Ebert Stifung (FES) – Ghana and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), themed, “Sustainable Development Goals and Decent Work: The Role of Social Partners.”
The forum was organised to ascertain the status of implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals by government, the successes stories and challenges with the implementation.
The forum brought together about 700 participants primarily made up of the leadership of Organised Labour.
By Pamela Ofori-Boateng/Business World Ghana