With government facing intense accusations of presiding over jobless growth, the challenge of creating enough jobs for Ghana’s rapidly growing youth population has become one of the defining economic issues of our time.

Every year, thousands of graduates leave universities, technical institutions and vocational schools with understandable hopes of finding meaningful employment. Yet the reality is that the public sector simply cannot absorb more than a tiny fraction of them.

It is therefore time to accept an economic truth that many successful countries have long embraced: sustainable job creation is primarily the responsibility of the private sector, not government.

Ghana needs to put politically driven contentions aside; this is not a matter of political point-scoring but of fiscal reality. Ghana’s government is operating under severe financial constraints. High debt servicing obligations, commitments to fiscal consolidation, and the need to fund essential public services such as education, healthcare, security and infrastructure leave little room for expanding the public payroll.

Indeed, creating large numbers of permanent government jobs would only increase recurrent expenditure and ultimately worsen the fiscal pressures that the country is striving to overcome.

The private sector, on the other hand, possesses the flexibility, innovation and entrepreneurial drive to generate employment on a scale that government never can. Whether in manufacturing, agribusiness, logistics, financial services, tourism, mining, information technology or the emerging digital economy, it is private investment that creates productive enterprises capable of employing thousands while generating the wealth needed to sustain economic growth.

Government’s role is therefore not to become the country’s largest employer but to become its greatest facilitator of enterprise.

This means maintaining macroeconomic stability, keeping inflation and interest rates under control, ensuring access to affordable financing, providing reliable electricity and transport infrastructure, simplifying regulations, enforcing contracts fairly, and creating a tax regime that encourages investment rather than discourages it. When businesses are confident about the operating environment, they invest. When they invest, they hire.

It is in this context that Ghanaians are eagerly awaiting the comprehensive rollout of the government’s much-publicized 24-hour economy initiative. Properly designed and effectively implemented, the policy has the potential to expand production,increase capacity utilization, improve competitiveness and create employment across multiple sectors.

By enabling businesses to operate around the clock where commercially viable, the economy can generate more output from existing investments while opening opportunities for shift-based employment, especially for young people.

However, the 24-hour economy should not stand alone. It would be even more impactful if integrated with a revitalized One District, One Factory initiative. While the earlier programmesucceeded in stimulating investment in several districts, many projects stalled because of financing constraints, weak implementation and inconsistent policy support.

A renewed version, aligned with the operational philosophy of the 24-hour economy, could transform district-level industries into round-the-clock production centres, creating value-added manufacturing jobs close to where people live rather than forcing migration to a few urban centres.

Ghana’s employment challenge cannot be solved through public sector recruitment drives. It will be solved by unleashing private enterprise under the guidance of smart, consistent and enabling public policy.

Government must therefore concentrate on creating the conditions for businesses to thrive, while businesses seize the opportunity to invest, expand and employ. That partnership not an ever-expanding public payroll—is the most credible path to sustainable job creation and shared prosperity