The unemployment among the youth continues to be the bane of Ghana's forward march to economic prosperity as many youth continue to migrate from the rural areas to urban centres in search of non-existent white colour jobs. In October 2006, the Government of Ghana launched the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) as part of a broader national employment policy and strategy. Over all, the NYEP seeks to empower the youth to be able to contribute more productively to the socio-economic development of the nation. It will specifically, try to identify projects with economic potential that can generate employment for a large proportion of the youth, check the rural-urban drift of the youth in search of jobs by creating job opportunities in the rural areas, create job opportunities for the youth through self-employment, and inculcate into the youth a sense of self-discipline and hard work.
The NYEP covers a wide spectrum of economic and social activities across all communities in Ghana. By July 2007, approximately 108,000 youth had been employed in the ten modules of the first phase of the programme. These ten modules include Agri-business, Trade and Vocations, Information and Communication Technology, Community Protection, Rural Education/ Teaching Assistants, Auxiliary Nursing/ Health Care Assistants/ Health Extension Workers, Internships and Industrial Attachments, Vacation Jobs, and Volunteer Services. Since the inception of the NYEP, some concerns have been expressed especially within the ranks of the labour movement that the conditions under which people are employed fall short of meeting international labour standards and national legal provisions of minimum working conditions.
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) therefore agreed to do an assessment of the programme to generate the needed data and information which would then be used by the unions to engage the implementers of the programme to improve the working conditions of the employees. The report of the study was completed in April 2008 and a validation workshop held in June to obtain the views and opinions of relevant stakeholders such as the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment, the Trades Union Congress and affiliates whose mandate covers the modules under study, and other institutions who engage the services of the NYEP employees in order to finaslise the report for dissemmination. The report confirmed some of the challenges the NYEP implementation has been faced with. It also exposed some other issues such as the disparities in the earnings between men and women and resulted in a dispassionate discussion between management of the programme and participants on how best to tackle the challenges. There was a firm commitment on the part of the Minister that the report would serve a useful purpose of improving the programme since it was the first neutral and credible assessment of the programme. |
