Director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), Professor Peter Quartey, has described the creation of employment for the youth to be dependent on the tourism and agro-processing sectors.
According to him, they have great potentials to reduce youth unemployment in the country.
Speaking at a workshop on ‘Industries Without Smokestack in Africa’, organized by ISSER and in partnership with the Brookings Institute of United States, the program sought to provide insight into options toward addressing Africa’s youth unemployment distresses through the creation of large scale employment opportunities to drive Africa’s industrialization agenda.
Prof. Quartey noted that, Ghana must redirect its attention towards identifying and pursuing sectors with great potential in addressing the unemployment challenges in the country.
“The idea is basically identifying some of the labor intensive industries; find out what they are doing, what their potentials are and how we can enhance their potential. So, basically, the study focused on agro-processing and tourism.
“One is that: these industries have potential for reducing youth unemployment and there is also the issue about skills gap. There is a high skills’ gap which has to be addressed and one will be for the industries to engage with training institutions- be it industrial attachments, so, that by the time they graduate, they will be ready for the market. They should also get involved in curriculum development”.
In curbing the growing unemployment among the youth, Professor Quartey urged government to reduce the cost of credit and resolve the lack of access to credit facilities and other constraints identified in the tourism and other agro-processing firms.
“Taxation issues have always been a problem; the AGI reports always highlights tax issues that firms have challenges with taxes. Sometimes, not even the amount, but the process of paying itself is a problem. We have to travel, we have to spend sometimes the whole day to go and queue and pay taxes, whereas in other jurisdiction, you can just go online, access your tax and pay using digital means.
“Access to credit for some of these firms is a problem because the cost of credit is high. It’s quite recently that it has come below twenty percent [but it was] around thirty two percent and what business can you do that you’ll be able to recover your cost and also pay thirty two percent on it as well?
“Luckily, these days, we’ve had other schemes that are supporting agro-processing”.
Prof. Quartey
According to Brookings Institute, structural change is taking place in Africa, but export-led manufacturing is playing a much smaller role than it did in East Asia, and services—some with quite low productivity—now absorb the bulk of African workers leaving agriculture and moving to cities. These differences in structural change reflect the impact of technological progress, a changing global marketplace, and natural resource endowments on Africa’s industrialization prospects.
Also, some industries without smokestacks rely heavily on post-primary level skills. For example, the IT-enabled services industry is frequently constrained by the lack of university graduates with relevant language skills. The skills needed to interact with tourists and to provide the many “back office” services that are inputs into the production of high-quality tourism are essential to its further development.
