According to the Youth Employment Agency’s (YEA) Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Justin Kodua Frimpong, the agency’s goal is to create 8,000 permanent employment for unemployed graduates within the next five years.
In order to decrease the country’s high levels of unemployment, the agency will do this through its newly established Job Centre.
This will be accomplished through the Agency linking both skilled and unskilled graduates with businesses in order for them to pursue long-term employment opportunities.
“Since we started the YEA Job Centre in 2019, we have had over 60,000 youths sign up and that was the starting point for us. So what we at YEA are looking at is that for years to come, our district offices should have a database. But from our job centre and our analysis, we are looking at around 8,000 persons in permanent jobs in five years,” Mr. Frimpong said on Face to Face on Citi TV on Tuesday.
Recently, the YEA, through the Centre, held a job fair at the Accra International Conference Centre, where many unemployed youth gathered in quest of employment from a variety of employers.
Over 1,000 young people were spotted waiting in lengthy lines, many of them were attempting to enter the facility in order to obtain employment with companies.
The YEA’s CEO acknowledged that a dearth of job opportunities for graduates is a huge hurdle that both the agency and the government must quickly overcome and find a long-term solution to.
He acknowledged that the absence of a “exit strategy” in the majority of the government’s employment social intervention programs is a significant cause to Ghana’s increasing unemployment.
“If beneficiaries after two years have to exit the program and reapply, we are not creating employment with the current modules we are running. So what is the exit strategy for the beneficiaries who go through our module for two years? Over 600,000 youths have gone through our program, but years after, we can not pinpoint and say this particular number of people have exited and transitioned into permanent jobs”, he explained.
This, according to Mr. Justin Kodua Frimpong, is something the YEA is working on.
He went on to explain that under the present conditions, putting pressure on the government to absorb the youth into the government’s payroll is virtually difficult, and that “when we say jobs, it’s not always about government sector work.”
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