Registration of Unemployed No Ruse - Director

The director of the Ministry of Manpower Development and Employment, Mr. John .Y. Amankrah, has stated that the registration exercise conducted sometime ago to enable the ministry obtain a reliable data to solve the unemployment situation in the country, should not be seen as a ruse to score cheap political points but a step in the right direction.

According to him, the exercise has given the ministry "a real food for thought" regarding the manpower development and unemployment in the country as well as identifying other sectors of the economy, which had potentials for job creation.

Mr. Amankrah who was speaking at the second graduation ceremony of the Hallmark Professional Institute over the weekend, disclosed that a survey conducted on the national labour market before the registration exercise gave, an insight into the nature of the job market and the type of skills and competence that industries are looking for.

Quoting from statistical data collected at the end of the exercise, the director asserted that young people who were barely literate because they dropped out of or could not school constituted 4.2 per cent of those registered while those who had either completed the Junior Secondary School (JSS) or Middle Form Four, constituted about 77%.

"A survey on those from the polytechnics and universities revealed that some young people had acquired skills but needed retraining to enable them succeed in Ghana's changing labour market," he added.

The director said that based on those observations, the ministry is faced with the task of seeing how best supply could go in hand in hand with demand. "

This entails developing interventions and programmes of activity that will enable people find productive and sustainable employment in conditions of freedom, equity, security as well as human dignity," he noted.

He reported that the ministry had developed what he called the " Skills Training and Employment Placement (STEP)" programme which, according to him, represents the Human Development Placement Component of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy as well as identifying a number of institutions, both public and private, to provide skills training and job replacement to people who registered.

In a presentation, the principal of the institute, Mr. Ernest Crosby Saka, stressed the need for all stakeholders in the education process to redouble their efforts so as to strategize an appropriate curriculum that could instill confidence in the promotion of technology and profession among the youth.