The Ashanti Regional Directorate of the National Service Authority (NSA) under the sponsorship of UNICEF, has held a ‘Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue’ in Kumasi.
The Dialogue, themed: “Building Decent Employment Pathways for Young People in Ghana”, brought together industry players, academia, technical and vocational training institutions, human resource experts, students and national service authorities, among others.
Mr. Foster Cosby Amoh, a Programme Officer at the Ashanti Regional NSA explained that the stakeholder dialogue was a platform for industry players and the institutional heads to come together to deliberate on ways to develop a tailored curriculum, which would enhance training of students for the job market in order to address the challenges of mismatch in the educational system and industry requirements.
He said one of the ways by which the government is trying to bridge this gap is the introduction of the National Apprenticeship Programme (NAP), which seeks to encourage students and even graduates who want to engage themselves in something practical to do so.
Mr. Foster Amoh said the country needed skilled manpower to develop because it lacks a lot of things and NAP encompasses almost all the skill areas and as the only way to have skilful workforce who can deliver on the job rather than “having good English speaking graduates or workers without skills to deliver on the job”.
The Programme Officer said the NSA does not provide direct job for the youth or job seekers, but facilitates the process of getting them job, acquiring skills and for young entrepreneurs to get funding, which is the reason the authority always partners and collaborates with agencies “to ensure that young people do not find themselves idle after school or after learning trade”.
The NAP beneficiaries of today, he said, shall become master trainers in the future and appealed to the youth especially the graduates to learn to volunteer and also to create partnership amongst themselves because the government could not do it alone, stressing that all the developed nations really relied on the private sector to develop their countries.
The Regional Director of the Ghana TVET Service, Mr. Richard Addo-Gyamfi said government through TVET and the Commission For Technical And Vocational Educational Training (CTVET) is doing all it could to ensure that the curriculum taught at the technical and vocational institutions are the same skills required at the job market and also to ensure that graduates have no difficulties in locating jobs.
He said TVET and the Commission are focusing on equipping students with employable skills to enable them become employable either on their own or with the job market emphasising that the demand for skilled labour in some industries in the country is high, so TVET and the CTVET are strategic in introducing programmes for the training institutions.
Mr. Emmanuel Fynn, Ashanti Regional National Service Authority Director in a solidarity message, stated that the authority was not able to post every service personnel to their preferred choices of work because of limited vacancies in such public institutions and advised prospective personnel not to be only interested in doing their service at the “big and juicy” state institutions but should “rather focus on institutions whether private or public that could sustain them after service”.
He decried attitudes such as arrogance, unpunctuality, not being proactive and innovative because no employer tolerates them and explained that it is part of the reasons the NSA was introducing the military training into the national service to inculcate into the personnel “the sense of national cohesion, patriotism and discipline”.
He urged prospective personnel to embrace the military training and not to see it as something scary.
From Thomas Agbenyegah Adzey, Kumasi
