Graduate joblessness is a manpower planning problem

The growing number of unemployed graduates in Ghana is not because the country is producing too many graduates but because there is no manpower planning to feed sectors of the economy, says Clement Dzidonu, president of the Accra Institute of Technology.

Addressing a graduation ceremony at the private university, he said that unlike many other countries, Ghana did not plan higher education.

As a consequence “there is lack of data on the manpower requirements and demands of the various sectors of the economy, to drive determination of the supply of graduate outputs to meet these demands”.

Dzidonu said Ghana had not been able to strike the right balance between the demand and supply of graduates across various skills. It was crucial to carry out a planning process in the higher education sector as part of the national development effort, to serve as a basis for the government to set quotas for graduate output in key fields and professions.

“We cannot as a nation continue to produce some types of graduates that the economy does not need and fail to produce enough of those that the economy demands,” he added.

According to the National Accreditation Board, there are now 86 tertiary institutions in Ghana – 70 private and 16 public – for a population of 25 million people.

“This translates into a university per capita rate of around 3.5 compared to the global average of 18.6.” Further, Dzidonu said, Ghana’s gross enrolment rate for tertiary education was 10% compared to the global average of 27%.

Based on this, “one is inclined to conclude that on the ‘demand side’, Ghana neither has enough universities for its growing population nor enough university places for its growing university going age group.

“In other words we need more university places to meet growing demand for higher education by qualified applicants,” Dzidonu said.

“On the ‘supply side’ of the equation, higher education was not producing sufficient numbers of graduates the economy needs. Rather, there was an over-supply of graduates in some fields and an under-supply in others, given the demands and absorption capacity of the economy.

“Either universities are producing graduates not needed by the economy, hence creating a phenomenon of unemployed-unemployables, or the economy does not have the absorption capacity to employ the employable graduates.”

Dzidonu said progress had been made in tackling regulatory issues in respect of quality assurance in higher education.

But unless higher education planning issues were addressed, including funding of the sector and taking on board the relevance of graduates to development of a modern economy in the knowledge age, “we will continue to indulge in an act of groping in thick darkness, without making any serious impact in meeting the nation's manpower needs and development”.