A new Afrobarometer survey conducted by the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) has revealed that unemployment and education are the most important problems that young Ghanaians want the government to address.
According to the survey, job creation topped the list of priorities Ghanaians would genuinely want government to spend to help young people. The findings showed that citizens are willing to pay more taxes to fund programmes for youth development.
Six in ten adult Ghanaians of all ages said they would support higher taxes to fund programmes to help the youth, while a similar proportion said job creation would be the highest priority if the government could increase its spending to help the youth.
Ghana’s expenditure on education is one of the highest in Africa with an allocation of over six percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
In spite of the relatively high levels of investment, experts argue that the education sector is not living up to expectations as standards are deemed to have fallen to an unprecedented low.
The survey found that spending on the sector has been largely based on recurrent payments in wages and salaries, as is common in other sectors, instead of investing in infrastructure, teaching and learning aids.
Educationists have argued that the state of education in this country is almost impossible to change Ghana’s economic status to a developed country from a middle-income with HIPC infrastructure, low total factor productivity and weak systems.
Already, employers complain about the poor quality of graduates at all levels of education – with some decidedly giving preference to Ghanaians who have schooled abroad.
A World Bank report published in 2018 warned that millions of young students in low and middle-income countries would face the prospect of lost opportunity and lower wages because their primary and secondary schools are failing to educate them to succeed in life.
The report, dubbed “Facing Forward: Schooling with Learning in Africa”, urged the Ghanaian government to invest in quality pre-primary education, which is critical to developing non-cognitive foundational skills.
Meanwhile, the government since 2017 has embarked on a free Senior High School policy that has increased enrolment by 50 percent to 1.2million students in second-cycle institutions across the country.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC), while commending government for its efforts in implementing the policy, suggested that the only way free Senior High School will pay for itself is to put beneficiaries of the policy into productive work.
