Labour Information System to link industry to skills

Mr Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, the Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, said government would soon roll out the Ghana Labour Market Information System (GLMIS) to link industry to available skills in the country.

He said it had become necessary to roll out such a system where the unemployed would link up with industry players to help solve the problem of unemployment.

Mr Baffour-Awuah was speaking at a public dialogue on jobs in Ghana, with focus on international good practices and national solutions organised by the Ministry, the Centre for Social Policy Studies of the University of Ghana and the World Bank.

He said the Ministry was working with the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) to enable it to get internet access at all public employment centres for use by individuals who may not have internet access on their own.

He said the main challenge with full deployment of the GLMIS had been the poor accessibility of internet in all the districts, thereby necessitating the arrangement with NITA to mitigate the challenge.

Mr Baffour-Awuah said data generation that would be generally acceptable by everybody would help to promote good international practices.

“If we have more reliable and generally accepted data by policy makers, the academia, and industry, then perhaps most of our problems are solved,” he said.

He said the GLMIS would be a common market place that skills could easily be identified and the results made available to the tertiary institutions for the training of candidates to meet industry needs.

The Minister could, however, not give out the timeline for the full deployment and the completion periods.

He said employment generation was a multi-sectoral activity, adding that government did provide employment as well as the informal sector, which employed many more people.

He said government provided the enabling environment for the private sector to grow to generate more employment.

Dr George Domfe, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana, said economic growth and job creation were accompanied by rapid urbanisation.

He said the economy was going through gradual structural transformation because agriculture had given way to service jobs mostly based in the capitals.