Government urged to strengthen TVET to address youth unemployment

Government has been urged to commit more resources to Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) as a means of addressing youth unemployment in the country.

It should pursue a radical shift in the design and delivery of TVET curriculum at all levels through a policy framework to adequately equip students with the needed skills to be self-employed after training.

Mr Siddique Abdul-Razak, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SAR Consult, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) involved in training the youth in employable skills, said it is time to pay attention to entrepreneurship as a country grappling with unemployment among the youth.

He was speaking at a graduation ceremony for 51 youth who had undergone six months training in beverages and pastry making in the Asokore Mampong Municipality.

The training organized by SAR Consult sought to equip the graduates with skills to be self-employed and create opportunities for others to be economically independent.

Over 2,000 youth in the Asokore Mampong Municipality have been trained in various vocations by SAR Consult in the last five years.

Four of the graduates who were sponsored by No Business As Usual (NBU), another NGO engaged in empowering the youth economically, received start-up equipment to enable them hit the ground running after their training.

Mr Abdul-Razak said it is imperative to empower the youth with practical skills to create employment not only for themselves but others to reduce the pressure on government for public employment.

Curricular in various universities and other educational institutions, he noted, must be designed to produce critical thinkers capable of creating jobs after graduation rather than every one of them joining the queue of job seekers in the public sector.

This, he said, was the way to go to tackle the perennial high unemployment rate in the country head-on.

He congratulated the graduates for successfully undergoing the training and charged them to impart the knowledge acquired to other youth desirous of learning from them.