The Director of the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS) of the University of Ghana, Professor Ayaga Bawah, says government must provide tax incentives to the private sector to create more jobs to absorb the teeming unemployed youth.
He said if the private sector was to expand and create more jobs, it would take the pressure from the government to create jobs for the teeming unemployed youth
Prof. Bawah made the suggestion in an interview with the Ghanaian Times in Accra on Monday, in reaction to the 2022 3rd Quarter Labour Statistics Report of 1.5 million of the youth between the ages of 15 to 24, having no education, employment and training (NEET), as issued by the Ghana Statistical Service, to commemorate World Youth Skills Day.
Prof. Bawah said a thriving private sector was necessary to help create more jobs, saying “people may have skills but if there was no vibrant and buoyant private sector to absorb them, their skills would be of no benefit to the country and society.”
He said employment opportunities had not expanded in tandem with the level of population growth and the number of students being churned out by the various tertiary institutions in the country.
The Director of RIPS also said the youth employment initiatives introduced by the government must be improved and expanded to provide employment for the teeming youth who were not employed.
Prof. Bawah said the large number of the youth who were not in NEET did not mean well for the stability of the country.
“If you have large teeming youth who are doing nothing, then they become an easy target for people to recruit them into all kinds of things including armed robbery, terrorism and social vices,” he said.
Prof. Bawah said the youth who were not into NEET was a threat to the security of the country.
According to him, Africa and for that matter Ghana, was not isolated from the infiltration of groups that were desirous of inflicting pain on the general population, and disturbing the stability of the region using the youth who were unemployed.
“We have seen that in other countries the youth have been recruited into all other kinds of terrorist groups,” adding that the youth became easy prey and were enticed with money to join terrorist groups, if they had nothing doing.
Prof. Bawah said the youth became disgruntled if they had nothing doing and felt they did not have equal share of the national cake.
“The statistics that are coming out from the GSS sends the signals that we have to do something and do it quickly, because that is potentially an explosive situation, if we have a large number of people who are not into NEET then that becomes a very dangerous situation,” Prof. Bawah stated.
The Director of RIPS stressed that the country’s demographic dividend must be harnessed to propel the economic growth and not a threat to the country.
“The demographic dividend is the situation where you take advantage of the large youth population of the population to propel growth in your economy by getting them into jobs and skills training,” explained Prof. Bawah, indicating that “when you have large proportion of the youth not employed then it becomes a threat, just not physical threat but economic threat because the economy does not grow.”
He said if the youth were employed it would improve their income and the general economy.
BY KINGSLEY ASARE
